Leslie A. Fiedler (essay date 1966)
SOURCE: “The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence” in Love and Death in the American Novel, Revised Edition, Dell Publishing, 1966, pp. 430-505.
[In the following excerpt, Fiedler discusses the idea of despair in Melville's works, asserting that Melville's style changed from gothic to sentimental as his career progressed.]
Melville was truer, finally, to the vision of blackness, which he pretended to have discovered in Hawthorne, than was Hawthorne himself. The reality of damnation he...
Source: Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, ©2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 3207 words.)
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