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1 results

  • Chapter 7 - Herman Melville and the American Romance Tradition

  • from Part II - Literary Contexts: Sources, Influences, Allusions
  • Edited by Steven Frye, California State University, Bakersfield
  • Book:
    Cormac McCarthy in Context
    Published online:
    12 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020, pp 68-78

  • Summary

    Romanticism and realism are not diametrically opposed, and the history of the terms “romance” and “novel” reveal dialogical genre processes. Optative romanticism in Europe and America is in tension with negative romanticism. The principal American romance tradition is largely one of a dark romanticism, in which the gothic and grotesque merge with realism in the “romance-novel,” as in the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and later modernist and postmodernist writers. Four basic modes of Gothic can be identified ontologically as: indeterminate “historical” Gothic; determinate “rationalized” Gothic; determinate “supernatural” Gothic; indeterminate “equivocal” Gothic. The ambiguous fourth mode may involve questions of metaphysics, epistemological uncertainty, psychological instability, and textual indeterminacy. The fourth mode characterizes the fictions of Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville – strikingly exemplified by the pervasive theme of “inscrutability” in Moby-Dick, McCarthy’s favorite book.