Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance

Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance

Bryant, John

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0195077822
ISBN13: 9780195077827
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Oct 28 1993
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.57
Height: 1.02 Width: 6.38 Depth: 9.36
Language: English
John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of the comic and repose in Melville's novels. The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Bryant argues that Melville fused a rhetoric of geniality and picturesque sensibility adopted from the British with a rhetoric of deceit borrowed from the American tall tale in order to create his own amiably cosmopolitan rhetoric of aesthetic repose. Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts.

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