User:Joltyl03
From 1850s
Contents |
[edit] Welcome to Tyler's "Moby Dick" Site
[edit] The Melville Renaissance
With an increasing interest in Modernist aesthetics, and fresh memory of World War I , Moby-Dick began to seem increasingly relevant. Not only did many of Melville's techniques echo those of Modernism: kaleidoscopic, hybrid in genre and tone, monumentally ambitious in trying to unite so many disparate elements and loose ends. His new readers also found in him an almost too-profound exploration of violence, hunger for power, quixotic goals, and reckless disregard for the fate of one's fellows. Although many critics of this time still considered Moby-Dick extremely difficult to come to grips with, they largely saw this lack of easy understanding as an asset rather than a liability.
In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about Melville's value.
In the 1920s, British literary critics began to take notice. In his idiosyncratic but landmark Studies in Classic American Literature, novelist, poet, and short story writer D. H. Lawrence directed Americans' attention to the great originality and value of many American authors, among them Melville's. Perhaps most surprising is that Lawrence saw Moby-Dick as a work of the first order despite his using the original English edition.
In his 1921 study, The American Novel, Carl Van Doren returns to Melville with much more depth. Here he calls Moby-Dick a pinnacle of American Romanticism.[1]
[edit] Selected Criticism
Taken From: “The Image of Society In Moby Dick” By: Henry Nash Smith
“In the most obvious and literal sense, the material of Moby Dick is drawn directly from nineteenth century American society. The narrative frame work is provided by a whaling cruise. The author takes great pains to report technical facts accurately. The ostensible motivations of the principle characters have to do with the conduct of this economic enterprise. And the book grows out of American experience in yet richer and deeper ways. Richard Chase, for example, has pointed to Melville’s debt to American folklore, his preoccupation with such characteristic American phenomena as Trascendentalism and humanitarian crusades, his interest in the West.”
Taken From: Studies in Classic American Literature By: D.H. Lawrence
“A hunt. The last great hunt. For what? For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, mostrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow white. Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it. He is warm-blooded, he is lovable. He is lonely Leviathan, not a Hobbes sort. Or is he?
