Introduction: The modernity of nineteenth-century American fiction -- "The being of language: the language of being" in Thoreau's A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers -- The metaphysics of imagination: narrative consciousness in Hawthorne's The Blithedale romance -- Writing and truth in Poe's The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym -- Ecliptic voyaging: orbits of the sign in Melville's "Bartleby the scrivener" -- Trumping the trick of the truth: the extra-moral sense of Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson -- The authority of the sign in James's The sacred fount -- Postscript: Through the custom-house.
