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Melville's Puritan Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Marcus L. Sheffield
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Extract

To a remarkable degree the literary works of Herman Melville (1819–91) have been read as subversive to traditional American religious aspirations. Some early reviewers, while praising the vivid recreations of the smell of salt air and the taste of hardtack, noted the blasphemy, perversion, and immoral elements they perceived in Melville's narratives of life among the peoples of Polynesia. Especially prominent for reviewers were Melville's literary assaults on Christian missionaries. Later, as his career progressed, he appeared to abandon the vivid for the mystifying and turned to regaling his readers with profundities, allegory, and metaphysics, or so the critics said. Melville's literary reputation glowed warmly for a short while, cooled, then died. As from the dead, the reputation was reborn in the 1920s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 25 , October 2000 , pp. 69 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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