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Monumental Melville: the Formation of a Literary Career.(Book review)

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From: Leviathan
Date: 20060301
Author:Wenke, John

Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career Stanford University Press, 2004. 230 pages.

Herman Melville's career as a publishing fiction writer lasted for eleven years, from 1846 to 1857. It was a period of great public success and greater public failure--failure, at least, from the perspective of certain professional critics and guardians of public morality who found such narratives as Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) to be a hodgepodge of sometimes blasphemous, nearly maniacal but mostly incomprehensible cross-purposes. After Melville lost his audience, after ...

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