Melville’s Little Historical Method

Abstract

Several decades removed from the historical “turn” in professional literary study, formal aesthetic considerations remain central to the scholarship of nineteenth-century American literature. The body of writing on U.S. author Herman Melville’s work provides one among many sites where the resultant available range of critical methodologies, including both aesthetic and historical approaches, have co-existed, if not always peacefully. What follows is in part a meta-critical consideration of this co-existence, the better to account for the continued interpretive purchase of historicism amid the field-wide resurgence of a “New” Formalism. At the same time, by singling out the signature New Historicist interest in anecdote as a literary form, this essay not only attempts to reconcile historical and formalist approaches to Melville’s general oeuvre; it interrogates one of the writer’s specific mid-career novels, Israel Potter (1855), in a synthesizing effort to demonstrate how the “little” narrative vehicle of the anecdote informed the author’s valorizing investment (at once personal, historical, and aesthetic) in smallness.