“Parts of the times”: history, politics and contemporary culture as coordinates of Herman Melville’s artistic universe
“Parts of the times”: history, politics and contemporary culture as coordinates of Herman Melville’s artistic universe

Summary/Abstract: As Herman Melville observed in his 1850 essay Hawthorne and His Mosses, “great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the times, and possess a corresponding coloring”. Although Melville’s vision bears the seal of the mythical, the indeterminate and the universal, his works seem to have absorbed and transfigured the essence of his contemporary world. The present paper offers a glimpse into that segment of the Melvillean studies which engage the dynamics of the relationship between text and context and address the question of cultural, social and historical embeddedness by referencing a few notable pieces of literary and cultural criticism meant to foreground the cultural, social, political and historical coordinates of the writings of this illustrious representative of the American Renaissance. Melville’s artistic universe is explored through the lenses of historicism, new historicism, cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism and various other critical tools, an enterprise apt to raise and possibly provide answers to enquiries related to the plurality of meanings which can be derived by applying various reading strategies to that kind of literature which probes at “the very axis of reality”.

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