Inter-related passages from his 1850 Hawthorne and his Mosses and 1851 Moby-Dick provide maps into the formulations of Melville's basic epistemology which allow us to better understand the author's interest in fragmentation, and in turn help us trace the developments of Melville's creative consciousness during the years 1853--1856, the period in which the author produced sixteen works of experimental short prose fiction following the critical failures of his longer romances. Although the study approaches the collected body of sketches as the major shift in the author's stylistic evolution, emphasis is placed on individual texts within the period which mark key shiftings in Melville's ongoing experimentations with modalities of form. A paradigm of tenuous equilibrium without reconciliation is embodied in various image strands throughout the works and will be shown to give shape to the experimental formlessness of Melville's sketches. Collectively, the strands make up Melville's aesthetics of incompleteness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21229 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Landeck, Jeffrey. |
| Contributors | Gibian, Peter (advisor) |
| 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 | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001655344, proquestno: MQ50534, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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