SOURCE: Mathewson, Stephen. “‘To Tell Over Again the Story Just Told’: The Composition of Melville's Redburn.” ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance 37, no. 4 (1991): 311-20.

In the following essay, Mathewson asserts that Melville expanded Redburn into a full-length book by repeating and recycling elements from the first section into the novel's sections on Liverpool and New York through a process of “self-plagiarism.”

In 1849, Melville feverishly and rather joylessly wrote Redburn, the first of two books he would complete during that summer in an effort to atone for the financial failure of Mardi. He wrote to his English publisher Richard Bentley that he had “enlarged” Redburn, “somewhat to the size of Omoo—perhaps it may be a trifle larger.”¹ Melville frequently relied upon sources while composing; for example, he enlarged his early work by incorporating exploration and travel narratives into his stories of South Seas adventure. In Redburn, however, he...