1 - Defining Melville: The Melville Revival and Biographical and Textual Criticism

Summary

Herman Melvill was Born on August 1, 1819. Herman Melville, having acquired a first bright and then gradually tarnished literary reputation, a final “e” at the end of his surname, and varied life experiences as a son, brother, schoolmaster, sailor, deserter, novelist, husband, father, lecturer, poet, grandfather, and customs official, died in semi-obscurity on September 28, 1891. It seems fair to assert that Herman Melville, the towering and alternately worshipped and reviled figure at the center of the American literary canon, was born (or re-born, as the case may be) sometime in the second half of the second decade of the twentieth century. In those years of war, revolution, disease, and chaos, writers on both sides of the Atlantic began projects that would create the “Melville Revival” of the 1920s and would push Melville from the status of a semi-obscure cult figure in the history of maritime writing to that of America’s most taught, most debated, and most tantalizingly elusive writer.

It is certainly possible to overstate the degree to which Melville had vanished from public consciousness prior to the Melville Revival. He was never completely forgotten, and he had passionate advocates from the point at which he lost the bulk of his audience in the early 1850s through the end of his life and on until the cusp of the centennial of his birth in 1919. Moreover, as Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker demonstrated in their 1995 collection Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, Melville’s works were never without perceptive and appreciative reviewers, however much the consensus of early reviewers turned against Melville after the publication of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852).

The earliest retrospective indications that Melville’s fame as an author might outlive him appeared before his death, and, curiously, came not from Americans seeking the Great American Novel, but rather from English writers interested in sea fiction. As early as 1884, English sea writer W. Clark Russell was arguing that Moby-Dick was not only Melville’s “finest work,” but was in fact comparable to Blake’s artwork and the poetry of Coleridge and Milton (in Higgins, 117–18). A year later, Robert Buchanan published a poem praising Melville with a footnote that described him as the “one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman” in North America (119).