Melville the Realist Poet

Renker, Elizabeth

doi:10.1002/9780470996782.ch31

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…13 As Renker has argued, "Melville's realist poetry eschews traditional poetic illusion and attempts to offer a new mode of poetic vision, one that is compatible with (although surely not identical to) the realist projects of his age." 14 Donnelly places a similar emphasis on the fact and feeling of destruction, reiterating a question Melville posed at the outset of Reconstruction: "What like a bullet can undeceive?" 15 To "undeceive" is to see reality as it is, free from romantic ideality.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Marrs¹

2023

American Literary Realism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, realism and Reconstruction are inextricable. In the U.S., realism was born in the crucible of the Long Civil War, 1 emerging as a vital mode for apprehending and describing a "reality" shorn of Idealisms and Transcendentalisms. That is one of the many reasons the Civil War and Reconstruction repeatedly appear in realist art and literature, from novels such as Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Henry James' The American, and W. D. Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (all of which are about soldiers or former soldiers), 2 to the poems of Sarah Piatt and Frances E. W. Harper and the paintings of Winslow Homer. Many of the writers primarily known for their commentary about Reconstruction, like Albion Tourgée and George Washington Cable, developed a realist style and philosophy which they saw as a natural expression of Reconstruction's aims and effects. 3 And such connections merely hint at the range and variety of mutual influences that linked realism to Reconstruction, both of which were rooted in a similar system of print networks, historical conditions, and cultural values.Recent scholarship, however, has made it abundantly clear that realism and Reconstruction were complex, protean movements. Realism arose in Europe in the early-nineteenth century, acquired a variety of proto-forms in the antebellum U.S., and spawned an eclectic range of literary, philosophical, and artistic forms, from Pragmatism (a metaphysical realism) to Naturalism (an offshoot of realist fiction), and appeared in a kaleidoscopic array of media, from paintings to magazines, photographs, sculptures, poems, and short stories. This is one of the guiding threads of criticism on realism,

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Marrs¹

2023

American Literary Realism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Lyric Anonymity inBattle‐Pieces

McGowan¹

2022

A New Companion to Herman Melville

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Beyond the walls–potentiality aborted. The politics of intersubjective universalism in Herman Melville’s Clarel

Peña¹

2014

AFLLM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 1876, U.S. writer Herman Melville published a volume of poetry named Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, which, later in life, he would describe to his English admirer James Billson as "a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity" (10 October 1884, Correspondence 483). Based on his trip to Palestine in January 1857, Clarel narrates the encounter of multiple characters -representative of different worldviews, vital energies, and ways of facing, enjoying, suffering, or enduring existence- in a context that human beings have, for centuries, constructed as a scenario of projected hopes and even foundational myths. Clarel takes its name from the main character, a young American student recently arrived in Jerusalem victim of his own theological, existential, crises. Both narrator and readers accompany the young Clarel and his fellow pilgrims/travelers in a journey through thorny questions and sandy deserts, which takes Clarel on a gradual process of unlearning. This trip brings the student and his companions out of the walled Jerusalem in order to explore the surrounding spaces of the Brook of Kedron, Jericho, the Jordan river, the Dead Sea, the monastery of Mar Saba, and Bethlehem. The pleasures of Clarel are many, yet also its pains as a text which incorporates readers into a severe analysis of the human condition in a Holy Land context carrying both local and global resonances.This study regards Clarel as a text that gives continuity to Melville's recurrent exploration of the dangers, beauties, (im)possibilities, and interconnection of intersubjectivity, universalism, and democracy. This exploration was always torn between the democratizing potentiality the author located in interpersonal relationships and the bleak realization that human beings -in the hearts of whom "Evil and good […] braided play / Into one cord" (Clarel 4.4.27---28)-might never materialize such democratic project. The dissertation defends that Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is a universalist poem which analyzes the necessity, ethical potentiality, political possibilities, and challenges of intersubjectivity for the creation of more democratic human relationships beyond the inter---human walls posed by communitarianisms of different kinds (e.g. nation---state, ethnicity, religion, culture, gender, sexual identity), which human beings have interiorized as "naturally" existing between them, as well as by individualistic -what Melville termed "one---sided"- attitudes and monologic thinking parameters. Focusing on Clarel as continuing the project of Melville's other works, my argument is that Clarel conceives what the dissertation names intersubjective universalism as an

show abstract

Melville the Realist Poet

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Realism and Reconstruction: A Comparative Perspective

Lyric Anonymity inBattle‐Pieces

Beyond the walls–potentiality aborted. The politics of intersubjective universalism in Herman Melville’s Clarel

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About