Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Melville's Shorter Tales

Melville's Shorter Tales

Fogle, Richard Harter

Paperback

General Fiction

ISBN10: 0806147970
ISBN13: 9780806147970
Publisher: Univ Of Oklahoma Pr
Published: Feb 17 1960
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.41
Height: 0.38 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Although the shadow of the great white whale, Moby Dick, looms perpetually large in nineteenth-century literature, Herman Melville's shorter tales have often been slighted by critics and readers alike. Those lesser shapes of the San Dominick, Bannadonna's bell tower, and the great Rock Rodondo of the Enchanted Islands have been seen only dimly through mists of neglect.

Richard Harter Fogle provides an accurate and rounded discussion of these relatively neglected Melville stories. His approach is broadly literary--expounding Melville's ideas as they exist in the context of the stories themselves and illuminating their connections with Melville's total work.

The quality of the tales is uneven: they vary from Benito Cereno, Bartleby, and The Encantadas, which are recognized as world masterpieces, to imperfect sketches like The Lightning-Rod Man and The Happy Failure. Yet all are serious investigations of meaning, informed by Melville's brooding and contemplative intelligence.

Avoiding psychoanalytic and mythical criticism, Fogle develops a genuine concern for Melville's own broad and nontechnical ethic, psychology, and metaphysic as woven into the fabric of his fiction. Melville is always, Fogle says, the seeker of knowledge pitted against a finally inscrutable reality. Perhaps borrowing from the courage of his subject, Fogle approaches Melville's mysterious and perplexing world with confidence in his essential greatness--as an author and a man.

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