In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America

Bad faith as the author calls the dissonance between what we profess to believe, how we act and how we interpret our own behaviour, is more than a theme in Mark Twain. Robinson shows that Twain's bleak view of man's social nature, his nostalgia, his ambivalence about the South and his complex relationship to his audience, can all be traced to an awareness of the deceits at the core of his culture.