Credit: www.pdimages.com

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

A selective list of online literary criticism for the nineteenth-century American novelist and story writer Herman Melville, favoring signed articles and peer-reviewed sources

Main Page | 19th-Century American Writers | 19th-Century Novelists | About LiteraryHistory.com

Literary Criticism

"Herman Melville." Introduction to Melville, from the college textbook publisher the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Armstrong, Philip. "'Leviathan is a Skein of Networks': Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick." ELH 71, 4 (Winter 2004) pp 1039-63 [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Baum, Nina. "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction." Writes Baum, "I think it can be shown that none of Melville's longer works are wholly or even mainly fictive, except in that broadest sense in which everything formulated into words is a fiction. But it is just this sense that everything formulated into words is a fiction that led Melville, in his later works, to despair of literature's being able to tell a truth. Indeed, I believe that Melville had no great respect for fiction, that he equated it with popular literature and his own literary infancy, and that in the works that most aspire to truth he expresses a range of attitudes toward fiction that go from impatience with its demands to a clear sense that fiction and truth telling are opposed activities." PMLA 34 (1979) (with revisions).

Bernard, Fred V. "The Question of Race in Moby-Dick." The Massachusetts Review 43, 3 (Autumn 2002) pp 384-404 [first page of article only].

Foley, Barbara. "From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's 'Bartleby.'" Orig. pub. in American Literature 72 (2000) [weird ads].

Goldner, Ellen J. "Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison" (and Charles Chesnutt, Toni Morrison). MELUS Spring 1999 [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Haydock, John. "Melville and Balzac: the man in cream-colors." Haydock hypothesizes that Melville's portrayal of the man in cream colors in The Confidence-Man was indebted to Balzac's similar character in "Jesus-Christ in Flanders." College Literature 35, 1 (Winter 2008) [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Higgins, Brian and Herschel Parker. A review of Reading Melville's 'Pierre; or, The Ambiguities' (Louisiana State UP 2006). Reviewer S.P. Rath applauds this critical examination of the manuscripts and publication details surrounding Pierre, a novel that holds an important place in Melville's personal history. Rocky Mountain MLA.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. "Beatrice Cenci in Hawthorne, Melville and her Atlantic-Rim Contexts." On the fascination with the "horrid" Beatrice Cenci story for American authors. Romanticism on the Net. 38-39 (May-August 2005).

Lamb, Robert Paul. "Fast-fish and loose-fish: teaching Melville's Moby-Dick in the college classroom." College Literature 32, 1 (Winter 2005) [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Leyda, Jay. Reviews of The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, by Jay Leyda; and of Herman Melville: A Biography, by Leon Howard. Reviewed by William Braswell in American Literature 24 (1952) [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Lee, A. Robert. A substantial introduction to Herman Melville from Literary Encyclopedia, 2003 [subscription service].

Lock, Helen. "The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass." Lock suggests approaches to teaching Melville's "Benito Cereno," since its treatment of the slave rebellion is problematic for many students. College Literature (2003) [first half of article only].

Olsen-Smith, Steven. "Herman Melville's Planned Work on Remorse." Nineteenth Century Literature 50, 4 (March 1996) [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Rosenberry, Edward H. "Moby-Dick: Epic Romance." College Literature 2, 3 (Fall 1975) pp 155-70 [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Schultz, Elizabeth A. Publisher's blurb for Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (UP of Kansas).

Wallach, Rick. "Moby Bear: Thematic and Structural Concordances between William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick." The Southern Literary Journal 30, 1 (Fall 1997) pp 43-54 [first page only, blurred, jstor].

Web Sites

The Melville Society. The web site provides information about its programs and events.

Bryant, John. "Typee: Fluid Text Edition." Subscription required. U of Virginia.

Main Page | 19th-Century American Writers | 19th-Century Novelists | About LiteraryHistory.com

1998-2012 by Jan Pridmore