Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 1993. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 375-396).

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The exploration and discontinuity of Melville's early life are reflected in his writing career. Before settling into silent conventionality, he wrote remarkably diverse prose. His aesthetics were individualistic: the page was an arena in which to deploy experimental strategies. / The novels from Typee to Moby-Dick can be regarded as action of mind as it explores ways of seeing and describing reality. But these experiments proved that vision is inevitably guided by the well-stocked mind and that Nature is an everchanging subjective construct. / In Pierre, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence-Man--the fiction that immediately followed these discoveries--the action is externalized. Melville now explores the artist's use of definite forms rather than his mental positings. Paradoxically, this new aesthetic came to serve his final purpose: of disengagement that was subsequently fully manifested in the silence that followed.

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Diss. Univ. Köln, 2007.

For the purpose of this study, metaphor is defined as a comparison which is not literally true. Such a comparison may be explicitly stated, as in a simile, or it may merely be implied, as in synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, or personification. In each case the primary or tenor image, a person, place, object, or idea in the novel, is compared to a secondary or vehicle image, a person, place, object, or idea not literally the same as the tenor image. The body of data on which this investigation is based consists of over fourteen thousand metaphors taken from Melville's nine novels. Each of these metaphors has been classified on the basis of its vehicle image. There are eight general categories, and tables are provided which show the number of metaphors in each category in each novel and the frequency with which the metaphors in each category occur in each novel. Overall, his metaphors suggest that Melville's vision of life was more often pessimistic than optimistic. They also reveal his growth as a writer. In the later novels, metaphors generally are more original than those in the early novels and are more skillfully related to his major themes.

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The thesis examines isolation and caritas, or charity, in The Confidence-Man as polar themes which express, respectively, withdrawal from and suspicion of the human community and integration within and appreciation for that community. Isolation is considered a negative theme; caritas, an affirmative theme.

This study of the elements of the Byronic hero in Herman Melville's Captain Ahab includes a look at the Byronic hero and Byron himself, the Byronic hero and the Gothic tradition, the Byronic hero and his "humanities," and the Byronic hero and Prometheus-Lucifer.

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