Melville and repose : the rhetoric of humor in the American Renaissance / John Bryant.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bryant, John, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Humor.

Melville, Herman.

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Humorous stories, American--History and criticism.

Humorous stories, American.

Rhetoric--United States--History--19th century.

Rhetoric.

Comic, The, in literature.

Narration (Rhetoric).

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xviii, 312 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1993.

Summary:

John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of humor 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. Arguing that Melville saw writing as a series of attempts to reach an unreachable union of word and thought ("voicing the voiceless"), Bryant shows how Melville attempted to place the reader in an equivalent condition of "tense repose." He posits that Melville incorporated laughter into his writing as a means of teasing the reader into deeper thought. To this end, Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale, thus creating his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose." Looking closely at Typee, Moby Dick, and The Confidence-Man, Bryant offers unique and ground-breaking readings of Melville's work - particularly with respect to the rhetoric of humor and repose, the picturesque, and cosmopolitanism. 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.

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0195077822

OCLC:

27187068