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.
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"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
About the Author
John Bryant is at Hofstra University.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly innovative and thoughtful analysis of Melville,
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This review is from: Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (Hardcover)
This is an extraordinary effort--one of the most thoughtful and innovative analyses of Melville's narrative guises ever published. Bryant is clearly one of the nation's best Melville scholars.
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Inside This Book
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
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soup societies, romantic ironist, genial desperation, genial misanthropy, literary confidence game, displaced fools, benevolent misanthrope, tense repose, genial misanthrope, inverse sublimity, comic debate, comic lying, amiable humor, metaphysical scamp, false geniality, eternal mildness, amicable collision, pondering repose, ape hair, picturesque sensibility, genial instinct, true cosmopolite, aesthetic restraint, cosmopolitan sensibility, picturesque moment Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
America's Comic Debate, The Confidence-Man, Moby Dick, Great Intellect, Big Bear, Rue Morgue, Little Henry, Rip Van Winkle, Frank Goodman, New World, Tommo's Rhetoric of Deceit, The Gilder, Black Guinea, Comic Debates, Personifying the Impersonal, Young America, The Uses of Cosmopolite, America's Repose, The Example of Irving, New England, The Whiteness of the Whale, Charlie Noble, The Candles, New York, The Doubloon Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
soup societies, romantic ironist, genial desperation, genial misanthropy, literary confidence game, displaced fools, benevolent misanthrope, tense repose, genial misanthrope, inverse sublimity, comic debate, comic lying, amiable humor, metaphysical scamp, false geniality, eternal mildness, amicable collision, pondering repose, ape hair, picturesque sensibility, genial instinct, true cosmopolite, aesthetic restraint, cosmopolitan sensibility, picturesque moment Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
America's Comic Debate, The Confidence-Man, Moby Dick, Great Intellect, Big Bear, Rue Morgue, Little Henry, Rip Van Winkle, Frank Goodman, New World, Tommo's Rhetoric of Deceit, The Gilder, Black Guinea, Comic Debates, Personifying the Impersonal, Young America, The Uses of Cosmopolite, America's Repose, The Example of Irving, New England, The Whiteness of the Whale, Charlie Noble, The Candles, New York, The Doubloon Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
6
books
cite this book:
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- Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing by Professor Elizabeth Renker in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Penguin Classics) by Herman Melville in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (New Americanists) by Geoffrey Sanborn in Back Matter
- The Book as Artefact: Text and Border (Variants 4) by Anne Mette Hansen; Roger LĂ1/4deke; Wolfgang Streit; Cristina UrchueguĂa; Peter Shillingsburg in Back Matter
- American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Material Texts) by Meredith L. McGill in Back Matter
See all 6 books citing this book
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