Melville Biography: An Inside
Narrative is enriched by a lifetime of intimate working
partnerships with great Melville scholars of different generations and by the
author’s experience of successive phases of literary criticism. Throughout this
bold book, Hershel Parker champions archival-based biography and the
all-but-lost art of embodying such scholarship in literary criticism.
First
is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating the award-winning
and comprehensive Herman Melville: A
Biography. Then Parker traces six decades of the “unholy war” waged against
biographical scholarship, in which critics repeatedly imposed the theory of
organic unity on Melville’s disrupted life—not just on his writings—while
truncating his body of work and ignoring his study of art and aesthetics. In
this connection, Parker celebrates discoveries made by “divine amateurs” and
praises writers of litblogs as potential redeemers of anemic, partisan
reviewing in academic journals and the mainstream media. Finally, Parker throws
open his biographical workshop and challenges ambitious readers with research
projects.
Provocative
annotations engage prominent life-writers (mainly British) in a highly original
seminar on the theory and practice of biography. This is a book for Melville
fans, Parker fans, as well as readers, writers, and would-be writers of
biography.
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