Description
Book SynopsisThe romances of Herman Melville, author of
Moby-Dick and
Billy Budd,
Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts.
Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.
Trade ReviewReviews ‘The traditional narrative is that Shakespeare’s works inspired innovations in Melville’s writing style, yielding
Moby-Dick (1851). Haydock rescues an orphan strand, arguing that Honoré de Balzac’s
La Comédie humaine (1842–55) inspired Melville’s conception of plot, characterization, and psychological analysis.’
American LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Debt to Honoré de Balzac
Chapter One: Networked Melville
Chapter Two: International Balzac
Chapter Three: M. de l’Aubépine
Chapter Four: Hawthorne’s Secret?
Chapter Five: Transvisionary Translating
Chapter Six: Balzac’s Types at Sea
Chapter Seven: Physiology of Thinking
Chapter Eight: American
ComédieChapter Nine: Toward the
Bouddha chrétienChapter Ten: The Clue in the Labyrinth
Endnotes
Index
