caa a22 4500 386309868 CHVBK 20180307111541.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198810 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0361233300006682 doi S0361233300006682 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0361233300006682 Miller David C. Infection and Imagination: The Atmospheric Analogy and the Problem of Romantic Culture in America [Elektronische Daten] [David C. Miller] The crucial twenty-third chapter of Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) develops an arresting analogy between the linguistic wiles of the latest avatar of the Confidence-Man (or Devil) and the imagery of infectious atmosphere. The chapter opens with a flood of allusions to the notion of an insidious agent hidden in the air, carrying infection and threatening death: "At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.” Eyeing from the boat rail the "swampy and squalid domain” that lies before Cairo, the Missourian, Pitch, peers through the "dubious medium” of a "dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies” and revolves in his mind a foregoing conversation with the P.I.O. man, who, only moments before, had induced him to pay money for a promised boy servant. He begins to suspect he has been conned. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988 Prospects Cambridge University Press 13(1988-10), 37-60 0361-2333 13<37 1988 13 PTS https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006682 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300006682 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Miller David C. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Prospects Cambridge University Press 13(1988-10), 37-60 0361-2333 13<37 1988 13 PTS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge