Year: 1969
Type: article
Abstract: N RECENT YEARS a number of important studies of Melville have appeared.Although these have approached his fiction from radically divergent points of view, there has been, for the most part, an implicit agreement with Charles Feidelson's belief that Melville "from first to last ... presents himself as an artist, and a conscious artist.It is in this character that he seizes our attention."1 Valuable studies of Melville's artistry and the formal aspects of his work have been contributed by Constance Rourke, F. 0. Matthiessen, Charles Olson, Newton Arvin, and most recently, Warner Berthoff; a wide interest in his literary reactions to religions and mythologies has culmi nated in H. Bruce Franklin's The Wake of the Gods; and a general concern with the themes and meanings of his books has produced, among others, the illuminating studies of Merlin Bowen and Milton R. Stern, as well as countless articles in scholarly journals.Closer to my own approach, however, is the work of those critics whose interests center on the predilections of form in Melville's fiction.Deserving special recognition here are Charles Feidelson's seminal discussion of Melville in Symbolism and American Literature; R. W. B. Lewis' account of Melville in The American Adam; Daniel Hoffman's analysis of Moby Dick and The Confidence-Man in Form and Fable in Americtrn Fic tion; Leo Marx's comments on Melville in The Machine in the Garden; and Paul Brodtkorb's recent study of Moby-Dick, Ishmael's White World.All of these investigations are taken for granted here, and without them and the source materials provided by such schol ars as Jay Leyda, Howard Vincent, Charles Anderson, and Merton Sealts, this study could not have been undertaken.
Source: The New England Quarterly
DOI: 10.2307/363479
Authors: Edwin Gittleman, Edgar A. Dryden
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2002000910