Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker's history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerising autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville's disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimising his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the ""divine amateurs"" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.

About the Author
Hershel Parker is the general editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Centre for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. Parker is the author of the comprehensive two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography.


Book Information
ISBN 9780810127098
Author Hershel Parker
Format Hardback
Page Count 656
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 938g