Цитаты из книги The Cambridge Introduction to The Nineteenth-Century American Novel

The novel's main action is repeatedly interrupted by meditations and digressions. In its fragmentary and collage-like collection of disparate materials - literary, mythic, religious, scintific, and historical - Moby-Dick has a distinctly proto-modernist aspect, resembling James Joyce's Ulysses

In terms of its allusions, Melville’s whale story can seem a veritable compendium of Western culture, calling to mind Perseus, Prometheus, Odysseus, Job, Jonah, Hamlet, Lear, Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Childe Harold, Montaigne’s cannibals, Coleridge’s ancient mariner, and Turner’s seascapes.

Like Emerson, Hawthorne understands that our desire for “permanence” is accompanied by a different need for “circulation” and “change” (Emerson “Experience” 1196).

The Scarlet Letter does not, like The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, leave us with a mysterious connection between opposed concepts; rather, Hawthorne’s narrative implicitly argues for a salutary if difficult balance between forces pulling in opposite directions. Tradition, history, established religion, and membership…

Like Poe and Melville, Hawthorne is interested to explore what we might call ontological confusion, the exploration of whether antithetical ideas or states of being, such as love and hate, are really separated by firm and certain boundaries.

Transformation of characters, as well as of interpretations or symbolic associations, is one of Hawthorne’s major concerns in the novel. Borrowing from Coleridge’s comments on Wordsworth, we might say that Hawthorne’s romance “was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their…

While the separate identity of opposed conceptions is never erased, throughout Poe’s romance a mysterious or unseen connection, dimly felt but never fully comprehended, haunts the literal and figural polar opposites we rely on to take our bearings and navigate experience.

Simultaneously, however, Pym’s voyage to the edge of the world is a journey inward to the depths of his psyche. The voyage out is a voyage in – an exploration of the labyrinthine distortions and mutations of the human mind under extreme pressure, a recurring theme in Poe’s fiction and poetry

In Poe’s view, the artist constructs worlds of obscure or complex symbolism teasing us with suggestive glimpses of truths that remain largely and satisfyingly concealed in shadow (hence, Poe’s dislike of straightforward allegory in which the symbol too transparently represents some truth or idea – in Poe’s terms, an…

These romances don’t necessarily or flatly contradict the idealist’s vision of a two-story universe in which signs or symbols drawn from daily experience stand in some meaningful relation to larger truths; instead, the obscurity and multiple implications of their key symbols expresses their authors’ doubt that the…