MELVILLE'S SHORTER TALES

Although the shadow of the great white whale, Moby Dick, looms perpetually large in nineteenth-century literature, Herman Melvilles shorter tales have often been slighted by critics and readers alike. Those lesser shapes of the San Dominick, Bannadonnas bell tower, and the great Rock Rodondo of the Enchanted Islands have been seen only dimly through mists of neglect. Richard Harter Fogle provides an accurate and rounded discussion of these relatively neglected Melville stories. His approach is broadly literary-expounding Melvilles ideas as they exist in the context of the stories themselves and illuminating their connections with Melvilles total work.The quality of the tales is uneven: they vary from Benito Cereno, Bartleby, and The Encantadas, which are recognized as world masterpieces, to imperfect sketches like The Lightning-Rod Man and The Happy Failure. Yet all are serious investigations of meaning, informed by Melvilles brooding and contemplative intelligence. Avoiding psychoanalytic and mythical criticism, Fogle develops a genuine concern for Melvilles own broad and nontechnical ethic, psychology, and metaphysic as woven into the fabric of his fiction. Melville is always, Fogle says, the seeker of knowledge pitted against a finally inscrutable reality. Perhaps borrowing from the courage of his subject, Fogle approaches Melvilles mysterious and perplexing world with confidence in his essential greatness-as an author and a man.Richard Harter Fogle, a Melville scholar, was professor of English at Tulane University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was the author of Hawthornes Fiction: The Light and the Dark and The Imagery of Keats: Selected Poetry and Letters.