Melville
Biography: An Inside Narrative, Hershel Parker’s personal history of
Melville biography, is enriched by his intimate working partnerships with great
Melville scholars of different generations and by his witnessing and weighing successive
phases of literary criticism. Part One is a mesmerizing autobiographical
account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography. Next,
Parker traces six decades of the “unholy war” waged against biographical
scholarship in which critics repeatedly impose the theory of organic unity on
Melville’s disrupted life, not just on his writings, even while truncating his
body of work and ignoring his study of art and aesthetics. Here Parker
celebrates discoveries made by “divine amateurs” and praises writers of
litblogs as potential redeemers of anemic, partisan reviewing in the academic journals
and the mainstream media. In Part Three, Parker throws open his biographical
workshop and challenges readers with ambitious research projects. Afterwards, Parker
turns many of his endnotes into a significant fourth section in which he
engages prominent life-writers (mainly British) in a provocative, highly
original seminar on the theory and practice of biography. Throughout this bold
book, Parker champions archival-based biography and the all-but-lost art of embodying
such scholarship in literary criticism.
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