White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts

The narrative of facts—probably best exemplified in the literature of exploration—was an immensely popular genre in mid-nineteenth-century America. In White Lies, John Samson offers full contextual readings of Melville's five major narratives of facts—Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Israel Potter. Samson demonstrates that in these novels Melville critically rewrote the sources on which he drew, in effect making the genre itself a subject of his writing.

In his introduction, Samson di...