10 - Bewildering Intertanglement

Summary

In her Introduction to a 1994 collection of critical essays, Myra Jehlen writes of how in America “Melville has remained canonical through the whole period of canon-busting.” According to Jehlen, new styles of literary evaluation may have found different things to admire in Melville, but they have not sought to devalue his central “importance or brilliance.” Melville has not, however, enjoyed a similar prominence within the British critical domain as it has developed professionally since the Second World War. Whereas Hawthorne and, to an even greater extent, Henry James have evoked a great deal of admiration and explication within British circles, engagement with Melville's more bulbous and erratic texts has remained spasmodic. My purpose in this essay is to suggest reasons for this comparative neglect, and to suggest how some of this discomfort may arise not so much from any simple antagonism on Melville's part toward the British tradition, but from the way he interacts with it in a perverse and parodic manner, turning its apparently legitimating structures inside out.