SOURCE: “The ‘Wholeness' of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Autumn, 1992, pp. 27-58.

In the following essay, Dolan determines Matthiessen's important role in the critical rediscovery of the work of Herman Melville.

Last year we observed two important anniversaries in the history of American literature: 1991 marked both the centennial of Herman Melville's death and the semicentennial of the publication of F. O. Mathiessen's American Renaissance. In the half-century between those two occurrences, Melville went from being an obscure New York writer of sea stories to his current status as one of the dozen or so American authors who cannot be ignored. In many ways, the path of his posthumous career and his consequent centrality to American literary studies is even more fascinating than the ups and downs of his career while he was alive. In what follows, I would...