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"The Encantadas" was the second of Melville's short fiction pieces to be published in Putnam's Monthly and appeared serially in the March, April, and May 1854 numbers of the periodical. Traditionally, Melville's career in 1854 is understood to be in decline, and he is seen as settling for a less demanding genre and smaller audience than before. Of his book-length prose works, only The Confidence-Man remained to be produced. At least part of this assessment of Melville depends upon a static understanding of genre as a hierarchical collection of fully- or nearly fully-formed textual structures awaiting content to be provided by individual writers and passively consumed by readers in a linear process of writing and reading. Also...
