Herman Melville and the Romantic 'living form'

Herman Melville and the Romantic Living Form is an attempt to re-open the discussion on the identity of Herman Melville's experimental novels, i.e. Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man. Since the beginning of their existence, they have constituted a problem for critics and literary historians because they combine a range of intriguing ideas with a form that has ever defied efforts to classify it on the basis of the existing concepts of literary communication both contemporary to its author and later. An interesting proposition apparently offering a way out of the deadlock is the hypothesis put forth by Denise Gigante in her Life. Organic Form and Romanticism suggesting that a number of Romantic literary works, whose structures deviate significantly from the traditional concepts of a union between form and subject matter may have been an effect of efforts to realize the Romantic idea of organicity in literary practice. Gigante points out the fact that the complex of intuitions brought to the discourse by the concept of organicity should not be restricted to the popular image of a static shape characterized by a harmonious interdependence of component parts and their unification in the structure of the whole. The metaphor also endorses intuiting the origination of the work as a process of mysterious self-shaped growing. A literary practice founded upon such principles would naturally be liberated from the dictate of both the author's preconceptions and intentions permitting the work to apparently germinate like a plant giving its identity away only after a series of transmutations, at the very end. When approached from that angle, Melville's novels reveal a consistent practice of following the free-flowing intuition driven by the author's philosophical compulsions, turning writing into exploration, and the narratives into instruments of intellectual investigation. This novel viewpoint on the well-known structures opens a range of fresh avenues into Melville's artistic concerns and ambitions, and suggests previously-unexplored interpretations of his seeming flaws and irregularities. Last but not least, the Romantic epigenesist poetics reconstructed by Denise Gigante may prove a valuable instrument of critical analysis even beyond the times that brought it about - for example, it is quite likely that many Post-Modernism aficionados might find it rewarding if they take the trouble to juxtapose e.g. Melville's Mardi with Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

• | Author: Tomasz Pilch
• | Publisher: Independently published
• | Publication Date: Sep 03, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 351 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1688887814
• | ISBN-13: 9781688887817