The Long Con: Fraud,Finance,and Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.

详细信息   

• 作者：Seybold ; Matthew Edward Alexander.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2012
• 导师：Thomas,Brook,eadvisorMailloux,Stevenecommittee memberSzalay,Michaelecommittee member
• 毕业院校：University of California
• Department：English - Ph.D.
• ISBN：9781267646361
• CBH：3540049
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：1899223
• Pages：219

文摘

In "The Long Con" I argue that the confidence-man is not,as is usually presumed,merely a descendent of the frontier hucksters of colonial fiction and the long tradition of literary "tricksters," but,rather,a manifestation of the cultural paranoia associated with the development of organized finance. John Maynard Keynes,primogenitor of the economic scholarship that facilitates my argument,observes that securitization makes markets more vulnerable to mass psychological forces,foremost among them what he calls "the state of confidence." Fittingly,as documented in my opening chapter,James Gordon Bennett make the con-man figure central to his polemics against another Jacksonian boogeyman,the Wall Street speculator,who likewise transforms naive beliefs into bankruptcies. In the three chapters that follow I address novels by Herman Melville,Mark Twain,and Henry James. In their work the con becomes more than just a trope in the convenient analogy between crime and commerce. Talent for persuasion,appetite for risk,and skepticism towards conventional wisdom make con-men,like Tom Sawyer,objects of sympathy,even idolization. Confidence-men revel in the flexibility of America's adolescent jurisprudence and the fluidity of monetary value in a society still skeptical of standardized currency,centralized banking,and regulatory apparatuses. In "pre-regulated economies" there is remarkable overlap between black markets and legitimate enterprise. Con-men relish the ambiguity. Confident characters like Colonel Sellers celebrate a simple pragmatism,in which lapses of honesty or decorum are justified by the motivation to profit. For a cross-section of American writers,including Twain,the con,though ethically dubious,is nonetheless a testament to the flexibility of laissez-faire capitalism and constitutional democracy. For others,like Bennett,the con-man cum speculator muddies the ideals of the "American experiment," extending a rhetoric of expansion and exception designed to excuse the oligarchic objectives of bankers,brokers,and Robber Barons.