Abstract
The two great English-language writers of sea stories are Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. Other major novelists, such as Defoe, Smollett, Austen and Dickens, turn to the sea, but it is not consistently at the heart of their works. Conversely, authors such as Marryat and Cooper set many of their works at sea, but cannot really be described as first-rate novelists. The most obvious similarity between Melville and Conrad is that the natural, and only true, medium of both authors is the adventure story.1
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Notes
On the adventure novel, see Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), and
Paul Zweig, The Adventurer (London: Dent, 1974). Conrad’s novels and tales are discussed in Chapter 9 of this book.
For a summary of Melville’s writing career, see A. Robert Lee, ‘Herman Melville, 1819–91’, in Paul Schellinger (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Novel (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), pp. 830–1.
On Melville, see Nick Selby, Moby-Dick (Cambridge: Icon, 1998),
Brian Way, Herman Melville: ‘Moby Dick’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1978),
Raymond M. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: Pageant, 1961; first published 1921),
Edward H. Rosenberg, Melville (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979),
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (London: Cape, 1967; first published 1947),
Faith Pullin (ed.), New Perspectives on Melville (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978),
A. Robert Lee (ed.), Herman Melville: Reassessments (London and Toronto: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984),
Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), and
William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of ‘Moby-Dick’: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
See Benjamin W. Labaree, Willam W. Fowler, Jr, Edward W. Sloan, John B. Hattendorf, Jeffrey J. Safford and Andrew W. German, America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 1998), and
Bert Bender, Sea Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from ‘Moby-Dick’ to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
On Conrad as a modernist writer, see the essays in Michael Roberts (ed.), Joseph Conrad (London and New York: Longman, 1998).
Herman Melville, Typee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a discussion of Melville’s ‘ability to be amongst the “others”’, see the Introduction to this edition, by Ruth Blair, p. xli.
For a general discussion of the representation of ‘otherness’, see Brian V. Street, The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction, 1858–1920 (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
On the image of Polynesia, see Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). This edition uses an unhyphenated version of the title, as does the book by Way in footnote 3 above; this is not the standard convention.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
For a variety of critical approaches to Billy Budd, see Robert Milder, Critical Essays on Melville’s ‘Billy Budd, Sailor’ (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), and
Hershel Parker, Reading ‘Billy Budd’ (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990).
Rudyard Kipling, ‘His Private Honour’, Many Inventions (London: Macmillan, 1964; first published 1893), pp. 109–27.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 1992). The tradition of maritime fiction in America obviously does not end with Melville. The central intention of Bert Bender’s Sea Brothers, op. cit., is to argue the case for the continuing importance of sea fiction. But Bender’s list of American sailor-writers from the 1860s to the 1890s — Robertson, Hains, Connolly, Mason, Risenberg, Adams, McFee, Colcord, Hallet and Binns — suggests a rather minor tradition. The only well-known names Bender discusses are Stephen Crane (‘The Open Boat’, a short story published in 1898) and Jack London, before he moves on to more recent times with Ernest Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen. The fact that Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952, over a hundred years after Moby-Dick, does seem to reinforce the view that maritime concerns lose their centrality in American life and culture after Melville.
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© 2001 John Peck
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Peck, J. (2001). Herman Melville. In: Maritime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985212_7
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