Contents -- Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources -- 1. A Great Intellect in Repose -- Humor and Being -- Melville's Aesthetics of Repose -- Melville's Rhetoric: Voicing the Voiceless -- Melville and the Reader: "Lord when shall we be done changing?" -- I: AMERICA'S COMIC DEBATE -- 2. America's Repose -- Britain's Amiable Tradition -- Amiability on Native Ground -- 3. The Example of Irving -- Irving's Comic Debate -- Salmagundi and Some Versions of the Bachelor -- A Rip in the Canvas: Irving's Picturesque -- Irving's Goldsmith and the Rhetoric of Geniality -- 4. Playing Along: America and the Rhetoric of Deceit -- The Deep Thought of Laughter -- A Veracious History of Lying -- The Lie of our Land: Forms of Comic Lying -- 5. E. A. Poe and T. B. Thorpe: Two Models of Deceit -- Poe's Humor -- Thorpe's Big Bear -- 6. The Genial Misanthrope: Melville and The Cosmopolitan Ideal -- Melville's Cosmopolite -- Europe's Cosmopolite: "At Home in Every Place" -- America's Con Man Cosmopolite: "Nowhere a Stranger" -- Herman Melville: "Diogenes Masquerading as a Cosmopolitan" -- II: RHETORIC AND REPOSE -- TYPEE -- 7. The Anxieties of Humor -- 8. Typee in Manuscript -- 9. Tommo's Rhetoric of Deceit -- MOBY DICK -- 10. Ishmael: Sounding the Repose of If -- 11. Ahab: Personifying the Impersonal -- 12. Melville's Comedy of Doubt -- THE CONFIDENCE-MAN -- 13. Comic Debates: The Uses of Cosmopolite -- Coda: Something Further -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.