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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.68581 |
| Date | January 1980 |
| Creators | Raff, Heather Ann. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000090600, proquestno: AAINK52096, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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