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From Melville to Eddie Murphy: the disability con in American literature and film.(Herman Melville)(Critical essay)

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From: Leviathan
Date: 20060301
Author:Samuels, Ellen

Herman Melville's 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has been closely examined with regard to nineteenth-century American politics, changing class structures, and the emergence of the "con man" as a contemporary trickster figure. (1) However, little or nothing has been said with regard to the role of disability in the novel, despite the proliferation of disabled characters in it. Yet at the time of the novel's composition, United States and European cultures were involved in a fundamental transformation of perceptions and attitudes toward disability that eventually ...

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