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Form as Function in Melville

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Nathalia Wright
Nathalia Wright*
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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Extract

The objection raised by most of Melville's early biographer-critics to the form of his major novels has been found largely answerable by more exclusively textual scrutiny and by recognition of the satiric strain in his literary tradition. It is now widely agreed that such compositions as Moby-Dick and Billy Budd are complete designs, consisting of related parts. But the terms in which Melville's structure has been appraised have not commonly allowed for the operation within it of a structural theory. It has not yet been perceived that he belongs, with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, among the American literary discoverers of the principle of organic form.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , June 1952 , pp. 330 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

1 The following are the chief discussions of this subject: Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, tr. A. M. Lussky (New York: Putnam's, 1932); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford, ca. 1941); G. W. Allen, Walt Whitman Handbook (Chicago: Packard, 1946); Fred W. Lorch, “Thoreau and the Organic Principle of Poetry,” PMLA, lii (1938), 286-302.

2 Willard Thorp, ed. Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York: American Book Co., ca. 1938), pp. 339, 385-386 (to Evert Duyckinck, [12 Feb.] 1851), 395 (to Hawthorne, [Nov. ?], 1851).

3 Mardi (London: Constable, 1922), ii, 159, 80, 253, 326, 328, 326, 329. Unless otherwise specified, all references to Melville's works are to this edition.

4 Moby-Dick, i, 164; ii, 101; i, 179, 92; ii, 9.

5 Pierre, pp. 198-199, 394, 412, 422, 359, 395.

6 The Confidence Man, pp. 91, 89, 90, 91, 318, 319, 244.

7 Melville's Billy Budd, ed. F. Barron Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard, ca. 1948), pp. 183, 154, 274.

8 Collected Poems, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Packard, ca. 1947), p. 39.

9 Clarel, i, 21.

10 Collected Poems, pp. 396, 397, 240. I am indebted here to Robert Penn Warren, “Melville the Poet,” Kenyon Rev., viii (1946), 208-223.

11 Mardi, ii, 106; i, 357; ii, 211.

12 Moby-Dick, i, 233; ii, 211. This is not the sequence in Melville's chief source for these chapters, Thomas Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale.

13 Pierre, pp. 411, 422, 426.