Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance

by John Bryant

Overview

John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of the comic and repose in Melville's novels. The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Bryant argues that Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale in order to create his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose." Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195077827
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/28/1993
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1310L (what's this?)

About the Author

Hofstra University

Table of Contents

	Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources	xvii
1.	A Great Intellect in Repose	3
	Humor and Being	6
	Melville's Aesthetics of Repose	8
	Melville's Rhetoric: Voicing the Voiceless	19
	Melville and the Reader: "Lord when shall we be done changing?,"	27
I	America's Comic Debate
2.	America's Repose	33
	Britain's Amiable Tradition	34
	Amiability on Native Ground	41
3.	The Example of Irving	52
	Irving's Comic Debate	53
	Salmagundi and Some Versions of the Bachelor	55
	A Rip in the Canvas: Irving's Picturesque	63
	Irving's Goldsmith and the Rhetoric of Geniality	66
4.	Playing Along: America and the Rhetoric of Deceit	70
	The Deep Thought of Laughter	70
	A Veracious History of Lying	72
	The Lie of our Land: Forms of Comic Lying	82
5.	E. A. Poe and T. B. Thorpe: Two Models of Deceit	88
	Poe's Humor	88
	Thorpe's Big Bear	100
6.	The Genial Misanthrope: Melville and The Cosmopolitan Ideal	109
	Melville's Cosmopolite	110
	Europe's Cosmopolite: "At Home in Every Place,"	112
	America's Con Man Cosmopolite: "Nowhere a Stranger,"	116
	Herman Melville: "Diogenes Masquerading as a Cosmopolitan,"	127
II	Rhetoric And Repose
	Typee
7.	The Anxieties of Humor	131
	Reliability and the Amiable Rebel	134
	Tommo's Picturesque	139
	Tommo's Amiable Eden	140
8.	Typee in Manuscript	146
	Drama and Restraint	146
	Finding Voice: Transcription, Transformation, and Translation	152
	Forging Ideology: Melville and "Little Henry,"	157
9.	Tommo's Rhetoric of Deceit	161
	Tattoo, Taboo, and Cannibalism: Forms of Conversion	162
	Tommo Prometheus	165
	Baffled Scientist and Con Man Revivalist	174
	Rover and Cosmopolite	178
	Moby Dick
10.	Ishmael: Sounding the Repose of If	186
	Ishmael's Initiation: Narcissist and Cosmopolite	187
	Knowledge and Voice	192
	Finding Voice: Ishmael's Genial Desperation	199
	Pondering Repose	204
11.	Ahab: Personifying the Impersonal	209
	"What Cozening, Hidden Lord and Master,"	212
	Displaced Fools	219
	On the Margin of the Maelstrom	228
12.	Melvill's Comedy of Doubt	230
	Melville's Reader: Partner, Victim, Participant	231
	Allegory and Breakdown	234
	The Confidence-Man
13.	Comic Debates: The Uses of Cosmopolite	244
	Pitch: The False Misanthropist	245
	Charlie Noble: The False Genialist	250
	Charlemont: The Genial Misanthrope	261
	Coda: Something Further	265
	Notes	269
	Index	299

Editorial Reviews

"Bryant offers unique and ground-breaking readings of Melville's work....Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts."—American Renaissance Literary Report

"Written in a lively and engaging style but incorporating an impressive degree of scholarly research, not only into the corpus of Melville scholarship but also the history and culture of the Renaissance, Melville and Repose is a major contribution to thought about the nature of America's first literary flowering."—American Studies

"Thoughtful inquirers into pre-Civil War American humor will need to read this book, which also bears on the 1840-1890 period not mentioned."—To Wit

"This is overall a rich and engaging analysis."—American Literature

"...the book informs, provokes, and satisfies, and not just because it reveals much about Melville and about American comic literature. It also provides a model of critical practive...that moves easily through the most minute of concrete detail but never loses sight of larger critical and theoretical concerns. It sustains the kind of intellectual balance that Melville himself sought in an elegant, but tense, repose that reflects the deep thought of laughter."—Nineteenth Century Literature

From the Publisher