Herman Melville : modernity and the material text / Katie McGettigan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McGettigan, Katie, author.

Series:

Becoming modern

Becoming modern: new nineteenth-century studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Criticism and interpretation.

Melville, Herman.

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

Modernism (Literature).

Criticism and interpretation.

United States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiii, 282 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham, New Hampshire : University of New Hampshire Press, [2017]

Summary:

In this imaginative book, Katie McGettigan argues that Melville's novels and poetry demonstrate a sustained engagement with the physical, social, and economic materiality of industrial and commercial forms of print. Further, McGettigan shows that this "aesthetics of the material text," central both to Melville's stylistic signature and to his innovations in form, allows Melville to explore the production of selfhood, test the limits of narrative authenticity, and question the nature of artistic originality. Combining archival research in print and publishing history with close reading, McGettigan situates Melville's works alongside advertising materials, magazine articles, trade manuals, and British and American commentary on the literary industry to demonstrate how Melville's literary practice relies on and aestheticizes the specific conditions of literary production in which he worked. McGettigan demonstrates that a sustained and deliberate maginative dialogue with the material texts is at the core of the Melvill's expressive practice and that, for Melville the printed book severed as a site for imagining the problems and possibilities of modernity. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Impressions of authenticity in Typee and Omoo

Bookbindings and identity in Redburn and White-jacket

Metaphors, markets, and Moby-Dick's "'sthetics in all things"

Pierre and the ambiguities of paper

Reproducibility, originality, and modernity in The confidence-man

Clarel's poetry and pilgrimage of print

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: McGettigan, Katie author. Herman Melville.

ISBN:

9781512601367

1512601365

9781512601374

1512601373

OCLC:

982090729