Abstract
This study sheds light on the fake shelters that masters of deceit and pretense in modern and contemporary American drama take refuge into flee the harsh realities they are entrapped in and the agonies they suffer as a result of being deceitful. The study discerns four types of deceit that pervade the entire modern American dramatic canon: familial, political, aesthetic, and economic deception. Though these masters of deceit resort to using different forms of deceit, they all seem to unconsciously use self-deception or pretense as a psychological coping mechanism. The theoretical background of the study is based on the contemporary poetics of deceit stated in Loyal Rue’s By the Grace of Guile, Anthony Abbot’s The Vital Lie and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.
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Mahfouz, S.M. The Agony of Deceit, Self-deception, and Pretense: A Comparative Study of Selected Twentieth-Century American Drama of Deceit. Neophilologus 95, 661–675 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-011-9249-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-011-9249-1