It fascinates me to see it used gratefully by people interested in modern British fiction, Renaissance drama, medieval poetry, and even, Lord Help Us, the Bible (the new Dutton Exodus). So here is someone in 2021 who thinks he disagrees with me in principle but after much hoopla decides that eventual archival evidence just might show that I am right.
I have been thinking a lot about what I contributed to Melville. It was not just transcribing documents. Over and over again I found stories while looking at a single document, say a shopping list, and realizing what marvelous episode of Melville's life that the list revealed, when you looked at the date in relation to the growing chronology.
I was going totally against the fashions by looking not at eventual archival evidence but at archival evidence which I could look at in the present. Every year, I see that FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS is alive. My goodness, it was one of the books a New Orleans professor, Jerry Ward, hated to lose.
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