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2006

Herman Melville

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Melville's Quest For Certainty: Questing And Spiritual Stability In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Damien Brian Schlarb Dec 2006

Melville's Quest For Certainty: Questing And Spiritual Stability In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Damien Brian Schlarb

English Theses

This paper investigates Herman Melville’s quest for spiritual stability and certainty in his novel Moby-Dick. The analysis establishes a philosophical tradition of doubt towards the Bible, outlining the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, David Hume, Thomas Paine and John Henry Newman. This historical survey of spiritual uncertainty establishes the issue of uncertainty that Melville writes about in the nineteenth century. Having assessed the issue of doubt, I then analyze Melville’s use of metaphorical charts, which his characters use to resolve this issue. Finally, I present Melville’s philosophical findings as he expresses them through the metaphor of whaling. Here, …

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Roving 'Twixt Land And Sea: Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, And The Maritime World-System', James W. Long Jan 2006

Roving 'Twixt Land And Sea: Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, And The Maritime World-System', James W. Long

LSU Master's Theses

Although Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad are generally regarded as sea writers, both wrote numerous works concerned primarily with events on land. But critical approaches to both writers display a tendency to prioritize one set of environments. A result of such approaches is to overlook the manner in which Melville and Conrad explore the relationship between land and sea. This paper argues that one way to analyze how both writers examine that relationship is by locating it within the space of the modern world-system. Immanuel Wallerstein defines the modern world-system as the capitalist world-economy that qualifies as the only historical …

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