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A selective list of articles on American novelist Herman Melville (1819-1891), favoring signed articles by known scholars, articles published in peer or editor reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Authors of Web Sites
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Atkins, Scott Eric. Online presentation on The Confidence-Man, include professor's essays on background and critical context, "The Metafiction of the Confidence Man, and links to text
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): 909-23
Cloy, John D. "Fatal underestimation Eugene Sue's Atar-Gull and Melville's 'Benito Cereno.'" Writes Cloy, "Eugene Sue and Herman Melville make strong racial statements in their nautical works, Atar-Gull and "Benito Cereno," presenting "blacks who are superior to most of their white neighbors in intelligence, cunning, patience, and fortitude." Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998
Cox, Richard H; and Dowling, Paul M. "Herman Melville's civil war: Lincolnian prudence in poetry." Political Science Reviewer, 2000 (removed from findarticles.com)
Foley, Barbara. "From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's 'Bartleby'" [Bartleby the Scrivener]. American Literature 72.1 (2000) 87-116
Goldner, Ellen J. "Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison" [Herman Melville, Charles Chesnutt, Toni Morrison]. MELUS, Spring, 1999
Goudie, S.X. Fabricating ideology: clothing, culture, and colonialism in Melville's 'Typee.' Criticism, Spring, 1998
Haydock, John. "Melville and Balzac: the man in cream-colors."[Herman Melville and Honore de Balzac] College Literature, 01-JAN-08
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. Special issue on Transatlantic Romanticism, Issues 38-39 (May-August 2005)
Jones, Gavin. Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995
Kearns, Michael. "Melville's chaotic style and the use of generative models: an essay in method." Style, Spring, 1996
Kemp, Scott A. "They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale." Style, Spring, 2001
Lamb, Robert Paul. "Fast-fish and loose-fish: teaching Melville's Moby-Dick in the college classroom." College Literature, 01-JAN-05
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. First page of article only. Reviewed by William Braswell. American Literature, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1952), pp. 245-247
Lee, A. Robert. A substantial introduction to Herman Melville from Literary Encyclopedia, 2003
Lock, Helen. "The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass," in College Literature, Fall 2003
Marx, Leo. "The Pandering Landscape: On the Illusory Separateness of American Nature." Paper presented at the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, December 6, 2000 [Melville and environmental criticism]
Morse, Kathryn. Putting History at the Core: History and Literature in Environmental Studies. "The literary narrative of the individual American in contemplation of nature is a rich one, but it is not the only story to be told. Environmental histories tell other stories as well, filled with drama and conflict, inequality and power, context and complexity. Such stories enrich the teaching of environmental studies in any classroom." Includes bibliography. The History Teacher, 37, 1 (Nov. 2003)[Melville and environmental criticism]
Murphy, Geraldine. "Ahab As Capitalist, Ahab As Communist: Revising Moby-Dick For The Cold War." "Contrasting F.O. Matthiessen's and R.W.B. Lewis's interpretations of Moby-Dick and Melville's later novels (in American Renaissance and The American Adam respectively) with Richard Chase's revisionist rebuttal (in Herman Melville: A Critical Study), the author describes literary discourse on Melville as an important site, in American Studies, to exorcise the old left and redefine liberalism in the postwar period." In Surfaces, Revue électronique, Vol. 4 (1994)(removed from http://pum12.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol4/murphy.html)
Olsen-Smith, Steven. "Herman Melville's Planned Work on Remorse," in Nineteenth Century Literature, Volume 50, Issue 4, March 1996 (removed from http://www.ucpress.edu/scan/ncl-free/504/articles/olsen-smith.art504.html)
Parker, Hershel. Publisher's web site for Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press)
Reiss, Benjamin D. "Madness and mastery in Melville's 'Benito Cereno.'" In Criticism, Wntr, 1996
Robbins, Fred W. "New age Melville," on trends in Melville scholarship. Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1998
Schultz, Elizabeth A. Publisher's blurb for Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Univ. Press of Kansas)
Short, Byran C. Two reviews of scholarly Melville books. Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder. (Kent State Univ. Press, 1997) and Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. By Douglas Robillard. (Kent State Univ. Press, 1997). SAMLA (removed from http://www.samla.org/sar/short.htm)
Thompson, Corey Evan. "The Locale of Melville's Gothicism." On The Castle of Otranto, British Gothicism, and its influence on nineteenth-century American writers. Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2007
Urbanczyk, Aaron. "Melville's debt to Milton: Inverted satanic morphology and rhetoric in The Confidence-Man." Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2003
Weyler, Karen A. "Melville's 'The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids': a dialogue about experience, understanding, and truth." Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994
Zimmerman, Brett. "Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices." Style, Spring, 2003
Melville Society web site, which provides information about programs and events, and online access to Melville Society Extracts #1-125. The extracts contain some fascinating reading, such as "One Hundred Years of Beat Attitude: Melville's Pierre as Kerouac's Dharma Bum," but the extracts are not indexed and must be browsed
Brief secondary reading list for Herman Melville and discussion questions for oral examination preparation at Columbia Univ.
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