{"title":"一个完全原创的失败:梅尔维尔在《信心人》中想象的读者","authors":"M. Seybold","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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. The Confidence-Man simultaneously invites and defies the many attempts to read it as allegory and, through a series of increasingly antagonistic metafictional interludes, Melville’s narrator berates his imagined reader and, vicariously, all his readers for their delusional expectations, hypocritical standards, and otherwise irrational reading habits.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2016-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Quite an Original Failure: Melville’s Imagined Reader in The Confidence-Man\",\"authors\":\"M. Seybold\",\"doi\":\"10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"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. The Confidence-Man simultaneously invites and defies the many attempts to read it as allegory and, through a series of increasingly antagonistic metafictional interludes, Melville’s narrator berates his imagined reader and, vicariously, all his readers for their delusional expectations, hypocritical standards, and otherwise irrational reading habits.\",\"PeriodicalId\":40584,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.1000,\"publicationDate\":\"2016-06-28\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"3\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"0\",\"JCRName\":\"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.8.1.0073","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
Quite an Original Failure: Melville’s Imagined Reader in The Confidence-Man
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. The Confidence-Man simultaneously invites and defies the many attempts to read it as allegory and, through a series of increasingly antagonistic metafictional interludes, Melville’s narrator berates his imagined reader and, vicariously, all his readers for their delusional expectations, hypocritical standards, and otherwise irrational reading habits.
期刊介绍:
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.