Pious Impostures and Unproven Words applies deconstruction to nineteenth-century American romances and to the concept of the traditional liberal arts education. Offering new readings of such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn, this volume shows that deconstruction is not necessarily antagonistic to traditional readings of literary texts. By establishing a clear relationship between deconstruction and the concept of a liberal arts education, Pious Impostures reveals that though deconstruction (as such) is 'new,' its most useful and usable tenets reach all the way back to the Bible and clearly overlap certain medieval and romantic ideas. Contents: Preface; Introduction; The Fact/Fiction Hierarchy Revisited; Errors of Truth: Deconstruction in The Scarlet Letter; The Subversive Lie of Expedient Truth in Pierre: Or The Ambiguities; Real Lies and Fictitious Truths in Huckleberry Finn.