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Quite an Original Failure: Melville’s Imagined Reader in
The Confidence-Man - Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 8, 2016
- pp. 73-92
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article explores how Herman Melville uses the elegant structure of the April Fool’s Day prank to anticipate not only the critical and commercial failure of his final novel in 1857, but also the proclivities of the twentieth-century literary scholar.