Herman Melville (1819-1891)

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A selective list of online articles on Herman Melville. favoring signed articles by known scholars, articles published in peer or editor reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Authors of Web Sites

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Literary Criticism

Baum, Nina. "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction." Writes Baum, "I think it can be shown that none of Melville's longer works are wholly or even mainly fictive, except in that broadest sense in which everything formulated into words is a fiction. But it is just this sense that everything formulated into words is a fiction that led Melville, in his later works, to despair of literature's being able to tell a truth. Indeed, I believe that Melville had no great respect for fiction, that he equated it with popular literature and his own literary infancy, and that in the works that most aspire to truth he expresses a range of attitudes toward fiction that go from impatience with its demands to a clear sense that fiction and truth telling are opposed activities." PMLA 34 (1979).

Cloy, John D. "Fatal underestimation: Eugene Sue's Atar-Gull and Melville's 'Benito Cereno.'" Writes Cloy, "Eugene Sue and Herman Melville make strong racial statements in their nautical works, Atar-Gull and 'Benito Cereno,'" presenting "blacks who are superior to most of their white neighbors in intelligence, cunning, patience, and fortitude." Studies in Short Fiction Summer 1998.

Foley, Barbara. "From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's 'Bartleby.'" American Literature 72 (2000).

Goudie, S.X. Fabricating ideology: clothing, culture, and colonialism in Melville's 'Typee.' Criticism Spring 1998.

Haydock, John. "Melville and Balzac: the man in cream-colors" (and Honore de Balzac). College Literature 2008.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. "Beatrice Cenci in Hawthorne, Melville and her Atlantic-Rim Contexts." On the fascination with the "horrid" Beatrice Cenci story for American authors. Romanticism on the Net. 38-39 (May-August 2005).

Jones, Gavin. Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno." Studies in Short Fiction Winter 1995.

Kearns, Michael. "Melville's chaotic style and the use of generative models: an essay in method." Style Spring 1996.

Kemp, Scott A. "They but reflect the things": Style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale." Style Spring 2001.

Lamb, Robert Paul. "Fast-fish and loose-fish: teaching Melville's Moby-Dick in the college classroom." College Literature 2005

Leyda, Jay. Reviews of The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, by Jay Leyda; and of Herman Melville: A Biography, by Leon Howard. First page of article only. Reviewed by William Braswell. American Literature 24 (1952).

Lee, A. Robert. A substantial introduction to Herman Melville from Literary Encyclopedia, 2003.

Lock, Helen. "The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass." College Literature (2003).

Marx, Leo. "The Pandering Landscape: On the Illusory Separateness of American Nature." Paper presented at the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, 2000.

Morse, Kathryn. Putting History at the Core: History and Literature in Environmental Studies. "The literary narrative of the individual American in contemplation of nature is a rich one, but it is not the only story to be told. Environmental histories tell other stories as well, filled with drama and conflict, inequality and power, context and complexity. Such stories enrich the teaching of environmental studies in any classroom." Includes bibliography. The History Teacher 37 (2003).

Parker, Hershel. Publisher's web site for Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Johns Hopkins UP).

Reiss, Benjamin D. "Madness and mastery in Melville's 'Benito Cereno.'" Criticism Winter 1996.

Robbins, Fred W. "New age Melville," on trends in Melville scholarship. Papers on Language and Literature Summer 1998.

Schultz, Elizabeth A. Publisher's blurb for Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (UP of Kansas).

Thompson, Corey Evan. "The Locale of Melville's Gothicism." On The Castle of Otranto, British Gothicism, and its influence on nineteenth-century American writers. Papers on Language and Literature Spring 2007.

Urbanczyk, Aaron. "Melville's debt to Milton: Inverted satanic morphology and rhetoric in The Confidence-Man." Papers on Language and Literature Summer 2003.

Weyler, Karen A. "Melville's 'The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids': a dialogue about experience, understanding, and truth." Studies in Short Fiction Summer 1994.

Zimmerman, Brett. "Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices." Style Spring 2003.

Web Sites

Melville Society web site, which provides information about programs and events. Back issues available for Melville Society Extracts, 1969-2005, through an awkward interface.

Bryant, John. Typee: Fluid Text Edition. Subscription required. U of Virginia.

Removed Articles

Cox, Richard H; and Dowling, Paul M. "Herman Melville's civil war: Lincolnian prudence in poetry." Political Science Reviewer, 2000 (removed).

Goldner, Ellen J. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_1_24/ai_58411664"Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison" (and Charles Chesnutt, Toni Morrison). Melus Spring 1999 (removed).

Short, Byran C. Two reviews of scholarly Melville books. Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder. (Kent State UP 1997) and Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. By Douglas Robillard. (Kent State UP 1997). SAMLA (removed) www.samla.org/sar/short.htm.

Murphy, Geraldine. "Ahab As Capitalist, Ahab As Communist: Revising Moby-Dick For The Cold War." "Contrasting F.O. Matthiessen's and R.W.B. Lewis's interpretations of Moby-Dick and Melville's later novels (in American Renaissance and The American Adam respectively) with Richard Chase's revisionist rebuttal (in Herman Melville: A Critical Study), the author describes literary discourse on Melville as an important site, in American Studies, to exorcise the old left and redefine liberalism in the postwar period." Surfaces, Revue électronique 4 (1994)(removed) http://pum12.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol4/murphy.html.

Olsen-Smith, Steven. "Herman Melville's Planned Work on Remorse," in Nineteenth Century Literature, Volume 50, Issue 4, March 1996 (removed from http://www.ucpress.edu/scan/ncl-free/504/articles/olsen-smith.art504.html).

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