This section contains 12,212 words (approx. 41 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: Robillard, Douglas. “Redburn: ‘Mythological Oil-Paintings.’” In Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint, pp. 47-69. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1997.
In the following excerpt, Robillard discusses Melville's linking of landscape and seascape descriptions with works of art through his character/narrator Wellingborough Redburn, who envisions the entire world as a work of art.
After his juvenile, unsuccessful efforts at ekphrasis in the “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” Melville did not attempt to use this literary technique for the next ten years. For a substantial part of that time, he was working as a school-teacher, a “boy” on a merchant ship, and a sailor aboard whalers and naval vessels. Returning to shore in 1845, he began immediately to convert some of his experiences into imaginative novels that had a firm basis in fact. Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Mardi (1849) all used the conventional novelistic device of scenic...
This section contains 12,212 words (approx. 41 pages at 300 words per page) |
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