Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

Introduction           17

The Confidence-Man in Context

America in the 1850s           27

Melville in the 1850s         37

The Origin of the Term “Confidence Man”      45

Themes and Analyses

Religion, the Bible and

the Question of the Practicality of Christianity        51

Devil Imagery and Shape-Shifting          61

“All the world’s a stage”           73

The Confidence-Man as Roman à Clef  85

Genre, Metafiction and Style     97

Stories-within-the-Story  113

Beyond The Confidence-Man

Subsequent Works and Melville’s Move towards Poetry   121

The Confidence Man as

Nineteenth-Century American Phenomenon   127

Appendices

The Avatars of the Confidence Man     145

Chapter Synopses   149

Chronology            167

Bibliography           181

Mark Niemeyer est professeur de littérature et d’histoire américaine à l’université de Dijon; il a notamment édité Confidence-Man dans la Pléiade. Il a effectué des recherches sur les écrits du 19ème de la période antebellum et il s'intéresse souvent aux questions de nationalisme culturel et d'identité nationale. 

Early readers of Melville’s last published prose work were, in fact, similarly lost. While a few contemporary reviewers of The Confidence-Man (notably English, rather than American ones) were able to make some sense out of the book, even comprehend certain aspects of Melville’s plotting devices and satirical intentions, many were not. Several regretted that the author had not offered the public a more realistic narrative in the style of some of his earlier works; others offered severe criticism of a book they simply could not understand. The Albany Evening Journal, for example, remarked, justifiable enough, that the book recounts “a story in which the incidents and characters are chosen with a view to convey a theoretical moral, not a vivid, graphic delineation based upon real life, like ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo’” (Higgins and Parker, p. 487).