Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Chapter 5 - Herman Melville
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
The majority of Herman Melville's short stories form a distinct group in his oeuvre and a distinct moment in his literary career. As a writer he is best known for his epic novel Moby Dick (1851) the story of the heroic and obsessed Captain Ahab's search for the great white whale. He also published the novels Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and Mardi (1849), all based on his experiences in the Polynesian Islands; Redburn (1849), based on his voyage as a seaman to Liverpool in 1839; and White-Jacket (1850), an account of life as a sailor aboard a British man-of-war. Moby Dick, despite its great later reputation, received mixed reviews when it came out and sold badly. Another novel, Pierre (1852), was very harshly reviewed, and a recent critic describes it as ‘a work of moral and metaphysical nihilism that estranged him from his readership’. In the early 1850s Melville also suffered from family sorrows: his third child died in 1853 and his fourth in 1854. The new decade was therefore a time of doubt and self-searching for Melville.
At the beginning of that same decade, however, he wrote the essay ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’ already cited above, a review of Hawthorne's collection of tales, Mosses from an Old Manse. Melville discusses ‘Young Goodman Brown’, ‘Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent’, and ‘Earth's Holocaust’, as well as a number of sketches and stories which are less often read today, and praises Hawthorne for his ‘tenderness’, but above all for ‘his great deep intellect, which drops down into the Universe like a plummet’.
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- The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story , pp. 43 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006