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Melville and the Meaning of Genre.(ALA 2007--Boston)(Herman Melville)(Brief article)

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From: Leviathan
Date: 20071001
Author:

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Is the concept of "genre" a meaningful one for understanding Melville? As scholars have long discussed, his career appears to move among what we might construe to be recognizable generic traditions (travel narrative, romance, sketch, tale, public poetry, the epic, and the lyric, for example) but also to contest them. (What kind of book is Moby-Dick? Is Pierre a sentimental novel? Why are the late poems mixed with prose, and why is the late prose mixed with poems? And what on earth is an "inside narrative"?) Scholars have presented arguments linking ...

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