Melville's Reading Research Articles

The Technical Development and Expanding Scope of Melville's Marginalia Online

Abstract: Melville's Marginalia Online was created by the authors in 2006 with the goal of making evidence of Melville's reading broadly available to scholarship. Carrying on the work of Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Wilson Walker Cowen, MMO maintains the documentary record of books Melville is known to have owned or borrowed and digitally edits his marginalia for open access by web users. Cross-disciplinary collaborations at the project have produced new digital tools for accessing and studying Melville's marginalia. In addition to introducing readers to MMO and its features, this article provides an overview of marginalia study in Melville criticism and explains how enhanced methods of inquiry present significant opportunities to assess and extend the work of earlier criticism on Melville. As its scope expands into areas of natural language processing and source study and as its technology is developed still further, MMO will provide scholars, students, and enthusiasts with the ability to identify the impact of Melville's reading on his own literary productions with new degrees of accuracy. Data informed scholarship, we believe, will build on the best Melville criticism of the past century and move Melville studies toward comprehensive and informed knowledge of his thought and writing.

Maritime Pedagogies of The Spanish Language: Or, How Much Spanish Did Melville Know?

This essay approaches the question of Melville's engagement with things Spanish and Spanish American not by analyzing cultural representations and stereotypes, but by asking: what was the kind and degree of Melville's competency in the Spanish language? How did he learn it and deploy it? The essay draws on corpus-driven evidence and theories arising from three overlapping subfields of linguistics: bilingualism, code-switching, and second-language acquisition. Further, it applies the sociolinguistic concepts of language attitudes and language ideologies to nineteenth-century contexts. Elaborating on scholarship on Melville's reading and what can be inferred from biographical evidence about his interactions with living Spanish speakers, it speculates on adjacent cases of Spanish-language acquisition by English speakers during the period. Richard Henry Dana's account of his self-study program in Two Years Before the Mast (1840) provides one example; Spanish-English textbooks, including John Emmanuel Mordente's New, Easy, and Complete Grammar of the Spanish Language, Commercial and Military (1810) provide others. By framing Melville's written and spoken interlanguage play within the prior, unrecorded context of his acquisition of Spanish, this essay expands outward from a single man's biographical record into the ambient conditions of maritime life in the Latin Pacific of the mid-nineteenth century.

Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance, by John Haydock

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

Books in Brief

Books in Brief Dawn Coleman HENRY T. CHEEVER The Whale and His Captors; or, The Whaleman's Adventures 1850. Ed. Robert D. Madison. Afterword Mark Bousquet. Hanover: UP of New England, 2018. xxxv + 242 pp. What did Herman Melville read, and when did he read it? And how did this reading shape his fiction? These are the perennial questions of Melville source criticism, the motor driving a robust tradition of scholarship epitomized by Merton Sealts's Melville's Reading (1966) and by Melville's Marginalia Online. Though a Melville scholar, Robert D. Madison barely addresses these issues in The Whale and His Captors, perhaps to avoid overplaying the literary angle of a title in the interdisciplinary "Seafaring America" series. Regardless, Melvilleans will thrill to the countless similarities between Moby-Dick and Cheever's learned and lively account of a whaling voyage, first published in late 1849, then more widely in 1850 (the basis for this text), and in an expanded version in 1853. Just five years older than Melville, Henry Theodore Cheever was a 28-year-old seminary graduate when in 1842 he took passage on a scientific cruise leaving from New York to recuperate his health and remedy a vocal condition. On this trip he would end up staying in Honolulu for 18 months, a period that overlapped with Melville's own three-month stint there. Given that Samuel C. Damon's Seaman's Chapel was a social node for both, it would be, as Randall Cluff wrote in Leviathan 3.1 (2001), "an incredible accident of history if the two men were not at least aware of each other's presence on the island." Cheever traveled home on a whaling vessel in 1844, earning his keep during the eight-month voyage by preaching to the sailors on Sundays. He arrived in Boston in 1845 and wrote his account while serving as the minister of the Free Congregational Church in New York City in 1848 and 1849. [End Page 121] Scholars have long recognized The Whale and His Captors as one of Melville's sources. Howard P. Vincent's The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (1949) pinpointed a half-dozen or so discrete borrowings. Yet Melville's perceived debt to Cheever dwindled over the course of the twentieth century, despite Cluff's essay and Keith Huntress's 1971 New England Quarterly article on Melville's rewriting of Cheever in chapter 23, "Lee Shore." Hershel Parker, for instance, mentions just two borrowings from Cheever in his biography of Melville. Nevertheless, readers of The Whaleman and His Captors will hear on nearly every page passages that Moby-Dick echoes with a difference. To take just one example, not mentioned in Vincent, Cheever writes, "Your ship, perhaps, has been thoroughly scrubbed and cleansed . . . and all again is ship-shape and tidy, when, just after dinner, as all hands are on deck, the welcome cry is raised, 'There she blows!'" (39). Melville seems to have read these lines and asked, is the cry welcome? In chapter 98, "Stowing Down and Clearing Up," he adopts Cheever's scenario and recenters it on the workers: "[M]any is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of 'There she blows!' and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life." Time and again in Moby-Dick, Melville rewrites a Cheever passage to be more vivid, more colloquial, more philosophical, and more sympathetic to the common sailor. And, dare I say, against those who have acknowledged in Cheever only a "cetological source" for Moby-Dick (including Samuel Otter in Melville's Anatomies), that readers will find in Cheever literary patterns repeated in Moby-Dick, such as the artful balancing of whaling incident and history and a tendency to round off exposition with moral lessons. Indeed, the narratorial perspective can feel uncanny. As with Ishmael in so many chapters, Cheever appreciates the whalers' labors while eyeing them from an intellectual distance, a stance that perplexes readers of Moby-Dick yet is entirely fitting for a ride-along chaplain. This...

At the Axis of Reality: Melville's Marginalia in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare

Although it is one of the most important resources to survive from his library, Herman Melville's seven-volume set of The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare has received little systematic analysis from scholars owing to the scope and complexity of the evidence. With the aid of computation and digital text analysis, this essay brings into relief hitherto unanalyzed and under-appreciated aspects of Melville's marginalia in the Shakespeare set. The essay's illustrations and figures indicate Melville's varying forms of engagement with the plays; word frequencies point the way toward ideas and themes that interested him; lexical uniqueness and word-sentiment values of marked passages shed light on the rhetoric and perspectives to which he gravitated. In connection with Melville's recorded statements about Shakespeare's craft and genius in his essay, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," the visualizations of reading evidence help to illustrate his conception of the Bard's profundity in brevity and his association of Shakespeare's greatness with philosophically "dark" themes and perspectives. Providing unprecedented access to evidence of Melville's reading, computation and digital text analysis offer new reference points for close analysis of the marginalia and fresh prospects for influence and source study.

Introduction: Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville's Marginalia Online

Introduction:Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville's Marginalia Online Christopher Ohge and Steven Olsen-Smith In an erased marginal comment on Shakespeare's character Parolles, the dissembling rogue in All's Well That Ends Well, Herman Melville invoked the most unexceptionable of mathematical formulas to reflect darkly on the abiding nature of human depravity: As 2 & 2 made 4 in Noah's time, as now,so man [?figures] ever. Here we have acharacter very common in the Rail RoadCar of the [?most mighty] nineteenth century.1 (Shakespeare's Dramatic Works 2.406) Roughly forecasting the subject of Melville's tenth book, The Confidence-Man, the recovered annotation also reveals a seemingly incidental but nonetheless significant penchant on Melville's part for quantification. Quantities appear frequently in Moby-Dick and in other writings by Melville, whose fascination with numbers was demonstrated recently in the pages of this journal by Zachary Turpin. Numbers are not scarce in the author's marginalia either. "There are 75 folio volumes in that," Melville observed of Jaques's words in As You Like It (2: 284.26–27). In light of this predisposition to unite the quantifiable with the profound, the Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) staff offer in the following essays digital text analyses of Melville's marginalia in his surviving copies of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Methodologically unprecedented, and conducted in an integrative spirit, the essays combine distant with close reading, exploring hitherto unknown or under-appreciated evidence of Melville's engagement with these three major predecessors. Quantitative and qualitative digital scholarship have led to a mixture of promising results and disillusionment, with increasingly vocal proponents and detractors. Opposing conceptions of the field are apparent in Timothy Brennan's recent article, "The Digital Humanities Bust," and the [End Page 1] vigorous defense it provoked from many digital scholars (for examples, see responses by Mandell and by Bond et al.). While the fairness and accuracy of Brennan's characterizations of digital practitioners' various activities is open to question, he makes a valid point that quantitative studies could more explicitly demonstrate the significance of their findings. High-profile studies to date have mainly addressed broad swaths of social literary output defined by regions and decades––for instance, the thousands of British novels published over a given century. Digitized archives now make such approaches possible and offer an exciting and potentially transformative development in literary studies. On the other hand, the stubborn disconnect between quantity and literary meaning can hamper such approaches, presenting conceptual shortcomings even for macro-analyses performed on data of a comparatively much smaller scale. As Brennan puts it bluntly, "The significance of the appearance of the word "whale" (say, 1,700 times) is precisely this: the appearance of the word 'whale' 1,700 times." But whereas no act of counting can substitute for critically interpreting a literary work, the usefulness and significance of word frequencies––both on their own and in relation to each other––are heightened in the study of marginalia. Indeed, the approaches demonstrated in the following essays indicate that an author's record of marginalia and lifetime of reading constitute a valuable big data set in its own right, albeit a fairly small one in the context of research computing. When the author is Melville, moreover, with a substantial record of marking his books and incorporating a range of sources in his own writing, the data can reward analysis in hitherto unprecedented ways. Only a machine can quickly compute word counts of selected content Melville marked in the plays of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works, or in each book of The Odyssey, or in Paradise Lost. Only a machine can stack a series of graphs showing lexical variety in Melville's markings or instantaneously classify by positive and negative sentiments enormous amounts of words that appear most frequently in passages he marked in multiple texts. Melville himself was devoted to the art of rhetoric and explicitly lauded both the "short, quick probings" and encyclopedic forays of great writers ("Hawthorne and His Mosses" 244). By using machine-derived word counts and visualizations to explore the thematic aspects of Melville's reading, the following essays demonstrate new means for...

"If not Equal all, Yet free": Political Freedom and Theological Doubt in Melville's Reading of Milton

"If not Equal all, Yet free": Political Freedom and Theological Doubt in Melville's Reading of Milton

One's Own Faith:Melville's Reading ofThe New Testament and Psalms

One's Own Faith:<i>Melville's Reading of</i>The New Testament and Psalms

Christian Typology and Social Critique in Melville's “The Two Temples”

Two Temples, like Melville's other short fiction of the 1850s, is notable for its multi-layered symbolism, allusive density, and subversive thematics. As one of the three so-called diptychs from this period featuring paired sketches of American and English subjects, Two Temples relates the experience of the unnamed narrator in pursuit of both spiritual communion and social community, first at a fashionable New York church and then at a London theater. Whereas at the church the narrator is a self-conscious outsider whose illicit attendance at a Sunday service leads to spiritual alienation and arrest for illegal entry into the church's bell tower, his unexpected access to a London theater leads to an experience of secular communion with the unassuming upper-tier audience during a performance of Bulwer-Lytton's historical drama Richelieu; or, The Conspiracy. The story thus contrasts the insincere act of worship found in the American temple, with its histrionic minister, to the displaced Christian charity found in the English theatrical during a performance by the celebrated English actor William Macready in the title role of the drama. Criticism of Two Temples has highlighted some of the story's religious symbolism, together with certain aspects of its biographical, social, and historical backgrounds, notably Melville's use of the new Episcopalian Grace Church on Broadway and Tenth Street as a model for the exclusive fashionable church represented in the first sketch, supplemented by interior details from the Trinity Church bell tower in lower Manhattan that Melville had visited with his brother Allan and brother-in-law Lemuel Shaw, Jr., in early 1848. Melville's ironic fictional treatment of Grace Church and its notorious enforcer of social exclusion, the sexton Isaac H. Brown (1812-1880), was in fact responsible for the reluctant rejection of Two Temples by the editor of Putnam's Monthly Magazine in the spring of 1854, the story not being published in Melville's lifetime. This article will explore the manner in which the paired sketches unite religious and historical themes through a strategic synthesis of Christian typology and social critique in order to convey paradoxical, potentially unwelcome truths about American and English cultures in the mid-nineteenth century. (1) As a key hermeneutical technique in both the composition and later interpretation of scripture, Christian typology was premised on the assumption that the New Testament was the fulfillment of the Old, and thus a number of representative individuals, objects, and events in the Old Testament, designated types, were duplicated and superseded by corresponding antitypes in the life and ministry of Christ. A historical variation on this tradition interpreted Old Testament types as models for Christian history, as in the figurative identification of colonial New England as the New World Israel, or its Puritan leaders as biblical patriarchs. Typological symbolism was pervasive in Puritan religious writing, history, and poetry, and it continued to influence nineteenth-century American authors grounded in Puritan theology and its traditions of biblical interpretation. Several of Melville's short stories of the 1850s, especially his last published story, Apple-Tree Table, show pervasive evidence of typological symbolism, a development that may be partly associated with Melville's reading of a new edition of Cotton Mather's history of the Puritan theocracy, Magnalia Christi Americana, at this time. (2) Two Temples offers a clear indication of its use of biblical typology within its title, for the two temples here can be aligned with an implicit contrast between the antithetical faiths of the Old and New Testament. Whereas in the Old Testament the idea of two distinct temples refers to the original Solomonic temple (tenth century B.C.E.) and the newer postexilic Jewish temple (late sixth century B. …

Typee: "An Almost Incredible Book"

In the lucid and learned essay, Flight to Taipi, the archaeologist Robert C. Suggs raises new questions about fact and fiction in specifically about the accuracy of the narrator's description of his five-day journey from Taioha'e (Melville's bay of Nukuheva) to Taipi (Melville's Typee), and Suggs does something more.1 Of course, questions about the authenticity of Melville's Pacific Eden are not a new phenomenon. During the last great wave of skepticism about Robert S. Forsythe, in Herman Melville in the Marquesas (1936), documented Melville's expansion of his several week's stay to his narrator's four months with the Taipi. Charles Roberts Anderson, in his influential Melville in the South Seas (1939), showed Melville's indebtedness in detail and language to the travel narratives of such early nineteenth-century writers as the naval captain David Porter, the maritime chaplain C. S. Stewart, and the naturalist G. H. von Langsdorff. Anderson argued that the autobiography in Typee was thin and the ethnography, while accurate, was largely compiled from his sources. Anderson saw himself as correcting the mistakes of Melville's biographers, who conflated fiction with fact. As Raymond M. Weaver, the biographer who helped to fuel the revival of interest in Melville's work in the 1920s, had put the case, Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket are transparent chapters in autobiography. While suggesting that much ofthe book was the product of Melville's reading and his imagination, Anderson also concluded that it was grounded in fact, point

A Cumulative Supplement to Melville's Reading (1988)

A Cumulative Supplement to Melville's Reading (1988)

A Fourth Supplementary Note to Melville's Reading (1988)

A Fourth Supplementary Note to Melville's Reading (1988)

Melville's Reading. Rev. ed.Merton M. Sealts Jr.

<i>Melville's Reading. Rev. ed.</i>Merton M. Sealts Jr.

Melville and his Precursors: Styles as Metastyle and Allusion

ELVILLE developed simultaneously and explosively as a reader and writer. In Charles Olson's words, reading is a gauge of him.... He was a skald, and knew how to appropriate.... He to write.... Melville's books on other men's books.'1 Unlike most writers who read to write, as Melville's enthusiasm for books increased he became less interested in synthesizing his materials, and more open about leaving literary and extra-literary styles recognizably distinct. Melville implicitly agrees with Eliot's sense of how authors use tradition, but he emphatically refuses to wait until all the particles unite to form a new compound.2 Most critics comment on the resultant formal inconsistencies, but few have sought in Melville's interaction with sources a true method at work behind the surface disorderliness of Ishmael's languages.3 Olson brilliantly probes the dynamics of Melville's reading of Shakespeare, but his word choices-skald, appropriate, batten -oversimplify Melville's responses to precursors, implying that

Melville's Reading.

Melville's Reading.

Melville Writing, Melville Reading: New Work on Melville and His Sources

Book Review| January 01 1989 Melville Writing, Melville Reading: New Work on Melville and His Sources THE PIAZZA TALES AND OTHER PROSE PIECES, 1839-1860. (The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, Volume 9)Melville, Herman; Hayford, Harrison; MacDougall, Alma A.; Tanselle, G. Thomas; Sealts,, Merton M.Jr.MELVILLE'S READING: REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITIONSealts,, Merton M.Jr.MELVILLE'S SOURCESBercaw, Mary K. WYN KELLEY WYN KELLEY Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Resources for American Literary Study (1989) 16 (1): 19–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/26366316 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation WYN KELLEY; Melville Writing, Melville Reading: New Work on Melville and His Sources. Resources for American Literary Study 1 January 1989; 16 (1): 19–28. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/26366316 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressResources for American Literary Study Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1989 Resources for American Literary Study, Inc.1989Resources for American Literary Study, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Melville Writing, Melville Reading: New Work on Melville and His Sources

Melville Writing, Melville Reading: New Work on Melville and His Sources

Melville's reading

Melville's reading

Premature Burial in Arthur Gordon Pym and Israel Potter

ESPITE THE lack of external evidence that Melville read Poe's JLJ' Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (i838), Patrick F. Quinn has argued convincingly that if Melville did not long and seriously ponder the essential drift of Arthur Gordon Pym then the similarities that exist between that book and Moby-Dick must be accounted one of the most extraordinary accidents in literature.1 Though the parallels Quinn describes are clear enough, further evidence of Melville's reading of Pym can be found in Israel Potter (I855), which is heavily indebted to other sources, as well-chiefly to Potter's own Life and Remarkable Adventures but also to various biographical and autobiographical accounts of John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen. One striking episode, however, has heretofore been credited to Melville's invention: Israel's three-day entombment in the stone cell of Squire Woodcock's mansion. But this entire incident of incarceration and escape bears a close resemblance to Pym's initial adventure on the

Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed

Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed