Gothic Melville

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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 writinga 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.

Author Bio

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.