author of fiction, and he later supported his family by working as a customs inspector at New York harbor. From his death in 1891, it was thirty years before Raymond Weaver published the first full-length study, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (1921), and this was seventy years after the appearance of Moby-Dick , the book whose freshly assessed stature brought new attention to the rest of Melville’s work.
When published, Moby-Dick received a good many reviews favorable in whole or in part as well as some dismissive ones, and brief approving accounts continued to be published from time to time into the next century. But it is interesting to ask why the great attention devoted to the novel and to Melville in general developed in the 1920s. Source studies have shown that Melville drew heavily on the popular literature of his day and that his readers found in the book much that was familiar to them; but this only makes more interesting the question about the slow general recognition of a great masterpiece.
This came about in part because the study of American literature was by then beginning to be respectable in university English departments, but it is no accident that the “rediscovery” of Melville coincided with the new experimentalism in all the arts in the years before and around 1920. The innovative work of artists like Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot made fresh demands on methods of interpretations. Change was in the air; Joyce’s Ulysses appeared the year following Weaver’s study. In literary study there began to be less emphasis on historical context, and more attention to the character of a writer’s rhetoric, the suggestiveness of symbolic structures, and the apparent fragmentation of traditional patterns of organization. When this kind of interest was given to Moby-Dick it stood up to every scrutiny that the period we call modernism could bring. It was not that Melville and his major novel were “before their time”—they were very much part of it—but that certain kinds of literature came to be examined in somewhat different ways.
Since that time, a large body of historical and critical work has enabled us to understand Melville much better than was possible more than eighty years ago, much less a century and a half ago when Moby-Dick appeared. This inquiry shows no sign of diminishing in our day, testimony to the continuing fascination he holds for us. As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic.
Carl F. Hovde is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Columbia University, where he served as Dean of the College from 1968 to 1972. He has also taught in Brazil, Germany, and Sweden. Specializing in American literature, he was principal editor of Henry D. Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for the Princeton University Press, and has been particularly concerned with the implications of high rhetoric in such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.
IN TOKEN
OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 1
ETYMOLOGY
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
[The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.]
Etymology
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”
Hackluyt.
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval .
When published, Moby-Dick received a good many reviews favorable in whole or in part as well as some dismissive ones, and brief approving accounts continued to be published from time to time into the next century. But it is interesting to ask why the great attention devoted to the novel and to Melville in general developed in the 1920s. Source studies have shown that Melville drew heavily on the popular literature of his day and that his readers found in the book much that was familiar to them; but this only makes more interesting the question about the slow general recognition of a great masterpiece.
This came about in part because the study of American literature was by then beginning to be respectable in university English departments, but it is no accident that the “rediscovery” of Melville coincided with the new experimentalism in all the arts in the years before and around 1920. The innovative work of artists like Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot made fresh demands on methods of interpretations. Change was in the air; Joyce’s Ulysses appeared the year following Weaver’s study. In literary study there began to be less emphasis on historical context, and more attention to the character of a writer’s rhetoric, the suggestiveness of symbolic structures, and the apparent fragmentation of traditional patterns of organization. When this kind of interest was given to Moby-Dick it stood up to every scrutiny that the period we call modernism could bring. It was not that Melville and his major novel were “before their time”—they were very much part of it—but that certain kinds of literature came to be examined in somewhat different ways.
Since that time, a large body of historical and critical work has enabled us to understand Melville much better than was possible more than eighty years ago, much less a century and a half ago when Moby-Dick appeared. This inquiry shows no sign of diminishing in our day, testimony to the continuing fascination he holds for us. As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic.
Carl F. Hovde is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Columbia University, where he served as Dean of the College from 1968 to 1972. He has also taught in Brazil, Germany, and Sweden. Specializing in American literature, he was principal editor of Henry D. Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for the Princeton University Press, and has been particularly concerned with the implications of high rhetoric in such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.
IN TOKEN
OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 1
ETYMOLOGY
(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
[The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.]
Etymology
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”
Hackluyt.
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval .
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