Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

With a broad and deep knowledge of philosophy, literature, and political issues, Herman Melville was a quintessential writer of the Romantic minor key. Romanticism, a dynamic yet vague condition of revolt against mechanism and overarching mercantilism, continues as an unresolved subtext of modern and contemporary industrialized cultures. Especially since the eighteenth century, it repeatedly emerges in transient forms and recedes into the undertones from which it came. During certain eras and by certain writers, it is a clarion call to creative action against threats to personal freedom. In the 1760s, 1830s, 1890s, 1920s, and 1960s, it found large audiences and lasted in each case from ten to twenty years. In the context of American Transcendentalism, the summons to awaken was sustained in the active Romanticism of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman. Less exultant writers of that era, especially Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, were no less charismatic and reformative. Romantic resignation, acknowledging the inevitable failures and disappointments that accompany exhilaration, is part of Romanticism's method and milieu.Many critics who have summarized Melville's quarrel with Romanticism have defined the term narrowly enough to create for Melville dark disagreement with transcendental idealism, but Romanticism ... log in or subscribe to read full text