Abstract

Unlike current deconstruction readings of early American literature that assert the relativity of language and of moral vision. Janet Gabler-Hover's Truth in American Fiction contends that most of the major novelists of 19th-century American consciously discriminated in their works between the moral and immoral use of language. They could be confident that their reading public understood this moral discrimination largely because of the widespread belief in rhetorical idealism, particularly the truth-telling power of language.