Melville's mirrors: literary criticism and America's most elusive author

Abstract

elville, I think, would have appreciated the scope of Brian Yothers's recent book. With rigor and grace, Melville's Mirrors examines a topic as vast and seemingly ungraspable as Ishmael's snowy phantom: the history of Melville criticism from 1920 to 2010. That scholarly archive is so large that, as Yothers notes, the MLA International Bibliography lists a stagger- ing 5,191 hits in response to a query for critical essays, books, and dissertation abstracts that take Herman Melville as a primary subject for their work (178). That number now surpasses 6,000 and is growing steadily, a fact that puts into perspective the achievement of Melville's Mirrors, which, in my estimation, is the most comprehensive and judicious study of Melville scholarship to date. The book might have been less successful had it been designed as one might reasonably expect: as a chronological narrative about the development of Melville criticism. Instead, Yothers constructs a taxonomy for the major lines of critical inquiry, a classifi catory system based on the family resemblances of various Melville studies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct strain of Mel- ville scholarship: Biographical and Textual Criticism; Literary Aesthetics and the Visual Arts; Religion, Ethics, and Epistemology; Gender, Sexual- ity, and the Body; Democracy, Nationalism, and War; and Race, Ethnicity, Empire, and Cosmopolitanism. Across the chapters, Yothers traces the history of these approaches, and the result is an erudite, and sometimes quite sur- prising, account of scholarship's longue durees. Chapter 1, for instance, charts a prehistory for the recent Melville biographies and digital archives by going back to Raymond Weaver, Lewis Mumford, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, and other members of the fi rst Melville Revival. In a similar vein, Chapter 2 yokes late twentieth- and early twenty-fi rst-century studies of Melville's verbal artistry to earlier—and today, rarely referenced—studies by R.P. Blackmur, Warner Ber- thoff, and William Ellery Sedgwick that examined the formal and aesthetic complexities of Melville's writing.

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