Published: 2021-12-30

Melville and the Indians: Reading, Cosmopolitanism, and the Biographical Condition

John L. Bryant

Website: https://www.hofstra.edu/faculty/fac_profiles.cfm?id=165
Section: Biographers on Biography - American Perspectives
https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11687

(An Essay in English / Esej w języku angielskim)

Abstract

Responding to the distrust in biography, widely accepted in literary studies, this article attempts to rethink the relationship between the reader and the author, with a special emphasis put on the role of the biographer. Such a task might help us read such texts authored by Herman Melville as Pierre; or The Ambiguities, which tend to raise our amazement and anxiety with their autobiographical entanglement. Moreover, the analyses of reading habits of the Melville family are crucial if we endeavour to understand Herman Melville’s progressing cosmopolitism and cultural empathy, influenced by the black legend of his grandfather and his involvement in the genocide of Native Americans.

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Citation rules

Bryant, J. L. (2021). Melville and the Indians: Reading, Cosmopolitanism, and the Biographical Condition: (An Essay in English / Esej w języku angielskim). Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (43), 65–86. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.11687

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Er(r)go 43 (2/2021)

No. 43 (2021)
Published: 2021-12-31


ISSN: 1508-6305
eISSN: 2544-3186
Ikona DOI 10.31261/errgo

Publisher
University of Silesia Press | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego i Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Śląsk"

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