Rhetorical Deception in the Short Fiction of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville (Studies in Comparative Literature , Vol 23)

Limiting his focus to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and Melville's "Benito Cereno," the author explores how the peculiarly American strategy of deception in short stories was developed by the three writers and used to challenge the older oral style of story telling. The deceptive strategy is explained as a way that stories undermine their own narrative and challenge readers to engage in an interpretive strategy of their own. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.