Abstract
That Melville has been the object of numerous “political” readings is not news. Melville is credited with perpetuating, reflecting, or subverting a host of ideological structures, among them imperialism, slavery, national expansion, market capitalism, anticolonialism, and heteronormativity. Reading Melville politically is also not new. In the mid-twentieth century, as Americans came to terms with the collapse of what had seemed to some the utopian promise of the leftist activism of the 1930s, Richard Chase, an eminent literature professor at Columbia University, turned to Melville to formulate a new version of liberalism. Chase is best known as the author of the influential study The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), one of the earliest “myth and symbol” studies often criticized for forming a “consensus” around American “character” through the establishment of a canon of “great” American literature. Although less well known, his earlier monograph, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949), a foundational text in Melville’s Cold War “revival,” is more important for Melville studies, which gained in breadth and sophistication following the end of World War II.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 219-232 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781139149952 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781107023130 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2012 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Arts and Humanities