Hoodwinking the World
Two Views of Melville's Piazza Tales
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895514 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ernest H Redekop (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1979 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 175-194 |
| Publication date | 1979-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-010-02-04 |
| OpenAlex | W1994275712 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
William B. Dillingham. Melville's Short Fiction 1853-1856. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977. 390 pp. Marvin Fisher. Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. 216 pp. In August, 1851, two months before the publication of Moby-Dick, The Literary World published Melville's review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, an essay as significant for its revelation of Melville as for its elevation of Hawthorne to supremacy in American letters. Melville feasted on "these Mosses" as on the bread and wine of communion, "incorporating" their stuff into his being, feeling the "germinous seeds" and the "strong New England roots" of Hawthorne growing into his soul. Unquestionably, he saw himself much as he saw Hawthorne, whose "great power of blackness" he admired, as he admired "those deep far-away things" in Shakespeare, "those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality."1 He had just written a book "broiled" in hell-fire, as he described it to Hawthorne, and its secret motto, he hinted, was "Ego non baptiso te in nomine—but make out the rest yourself...."2 So he identified himself with Shakespeare and Hawthorne in his pursuiit of "the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly, and by snatches" and became, like them, a hunter: "For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a sacred white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself...."3
Art · Art history · Literature · Power (physics · Revelation · Soul · Theology · White (mutation · American and British Literature Analysis · History · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Short Stories in Global Literature
| Highly cited | No |
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