William Melville's Books

Melville's Later Novels

By: William B. Dillingham

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Melville's Later Novels

By: William B. Dillingham

The confidence-man and alchemy -- Keeping true: Billy Budd, sailor.

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Page Count

464

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820307998

ISBN 13

9780820307992

Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856

By: William B. Dillingham

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Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856

By: William B. Dillingham

This study treats comprehensively the sixteen short works of fiction that Herman Melville wrote between 1853 and 1856, most of which were published in Harper's and Putnam's magazines. Concentrating on the writer's two basic motivations for writing as he did in these stories, Dillingham argues that Melville created a surface of almost inane congeniality in many of the works, an illusion of vapidity that camouflages a profundity often missed by his readers. He sought to to hide disturbing themes because the magazines for which he was writing would almost certainly have rejected his attempts to be more direct. Dillingham's method is not, however, confined to a reading of the texts. Melville's stories contain so many allusions to the contemporary scene that they constitute in themselves a cultural study. An important contribution of Melville's Short Fiction is its discussion of these allusions. Finally, Dillingham examines the relationship between the short fiction and Melville's own life. Much of the writer's frustration and struggle is concealed in these early works. Melville's friendship with Hawthorne, for example, an intense and yet in some ways disappointing relationship for both men, is explored as an important influence on several of the stories.

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Page Count

406

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820332712

ISBN 13

9780820332710

Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds

By: William Potter

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Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds

By: William Potter

Clarel, an 18,000-line poem, is one of the longest examples of the faith-doubt genre that arose in Victorian times and one that has largely been neglected by Melville critics. Author William Potter argues that Melville's poem Clarel is instead a study in comparative religion - one that explores faith in the post-Darwinian age. It was written at a crossroads point in Western thought, when science, technology, nationalism, and imperialism were reshaping the world and in the process ushered in the modern age. Potter claims the poem argues that science may have altered our perception of the world, but it cannot eradicate the basic human need for faith, which is timeless and which therefore encompasses far more than the concerns of Western Christianity. In Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds, Potter examines the poem within this historical context and by so doing attempts to solve some of the issues that critics have asserted the poem presents. He reviews the burgeoning field of comparative religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes discussions of many of the theories and ideas of well-known figures of the time such as Hegel, Hume, Muller, Emerson, Wh

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Page Count

274

Publisher

Kent State University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

087338797X

ISBN 13

9780873387972

F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism

By: William E. Cain

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F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism

By: William E. Cain

F.O. Matthiessen remains one of America's leading twentieth-century critics in part because the problems he and his contemporaries struggled with remain ours today. William E. Cain studies Matthiessen's career with careful attention to biographical, institutional, literary, and political contexts. He considers Matthiessen's many reviews and essays on literature and deals sympathetically, but critically, with Matthiessen's attitudes toward the Cold War as revealed in his memoir, From the Heart of Europe. Cain draws connections between Matthiessen's criticism and the influence of significant political movements like the Popular Front of the 1930s, the Progressive Party, and Henry Wallace's campaign for the presidency in 1948. Analyzing specific texts by Thoreau, James, Dreiser, and Melville, he confronts the difficult and highly contested relationships between literary criticism and politics, scholarship and the public sphere, pedagogy and social activism. He suggests that critics need to acknowledge the primacy of their political commitments and should proceed to teach and write accordingly. This argument, certain to prove a controversial one, will spark extensive debate and discussion about the theory and practice of intellectual work. All students and scholars of English and American literature, American studies, black studies, and American history will welcome this original and stimulating study, the first to treat Matthiessen in fully detailed social, historical, and political contexts. .

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Page Count

260

Publisher

Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0299119149

ISBN 13

9780299119140

Literature and the Marketplace

Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States

By: William G. Rowland

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Literature and the Marketplace

Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States

By: William G. Rowland

Literature and the Marketplace addresses one of the great ironies of nineteenth-century British and American literature: the fact that authors of that era, in voicing their alienation from middle-class readers, paradoxically gave expression to feelings of alienation felt by those same readers. As William G. Rowland Jr. points out, romantic writers "thought of the market as conspiring against 'imagination' (Blake) or 'telling the truth' (Melville)" and consequently felt frustrated with literary institutions. Yet their "frustrations, " writes Rowland, "helped to energize romantic work and explain its subsequent and continuing appeal." The book opens with a survey of reading publics in Great Britain and the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. Rowland then presents individual writers-including Wordsworth, Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, and Emerson-and their relations to their readers. Finally, Rowland shows how the idea of genius was developed by writers as different as Coleridge, Blake, Whitman, and Dickinson and how that idea evolved as an antidote to the commercial literary marketplace of the nineteenth century. A wide-ranging and provocative book, Literature and the Marketplace describes the relations between important British and American authors and the audiences and publishing industries of their era-relations that were troubled, uncertain, and remarkably productive of literature. William G. Rowland Jr. is the Director of Studies at Hereford Residential College, University of Virginia. This is his first book.

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Page Count

254

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803239181

ISBN 13

9780803239180

Book's by William Melville

Melville's Later Novels

Melville's Later Novels

Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856

Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856

Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds

Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds

F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism

F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism

Literature and the Marketplace

Literature and the Marketplace

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