Gothic Melville (Gothic Literary Studies)

Gothic Melville (Gothic Literary Studies)

The first book to explore Herman Melville as a Gothic writer. In a famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse , Herman Melville took the critics to task for missing the darkness as the heart of Hawthorne’s writing—a blackness “ten times black,” as Melville put it, that fascinated him. Ironically, Melville has been subject to the same treatment by critics who have in large measure steered clear of Melville’s darkness. The contributors to Gothic Melville reveal that, if Hawthorne’s darkness is ten times black, then Melville’s is a hundred times so, as his works repeatedly raise questions about what the truth is or if truth exists at all. This edited collection of scholarly essays makes up for the critical neglect of Melville’s Gothicism by arguing that the Gothic is so extensively interwoven into the fabric of his writing that Melville must at last be recognized as among the genre’s most important practitioners. "This is a bracing, heady, invaluable collection of essays that fulfils a crucial gap in Melville studies. It allows the reader to understand, as they should, that Melville is one of the foundational authors of the American Gothic. The wide-ranging approaches here reflect the profound vitality of the Gothic and Melville’s hectic genius at once." ― David Greven, Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence "Americanists have long needed a comprehensive study of Melville’s Gothicism. In Gothic Melville, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Monika Elbert have met that need, bringing together thirteen fresh, informed, illuminating essays on a wide range of the author’s Gothic writings – from Moby-Dick to “The Encantadas.'" ― Christopher Sten, Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature, George Washington University, author of The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel; Sounding the Whale; and Melville's Other Lives: Bodies on Trial in The Piazza Tales Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University. He is the horror editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and founder and director of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic. Monika Elbert is professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University in New Jersey and editor of Nathaniel Hawthorne Review.