Melville, Herman (1819 - 1891) | "Benito Cereno"
"Benito Cereno"
NALINI V. SHETTY (ESSAY DATE 1976)
SOURCE: Shetty, Nalini V. "Melville's Use of the Gothic Tradition." In Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour of William Mulder, edited by Jagdish Chander and Narindar S. Pradhan, pp. 144-53. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1976.
In the following essay, Shetty "define[s] Melville's use of the Gothic technique … in 'Benito Cereno,' and define[s] his extension of the Gothic form."
Literature abounds in images of the restless ghost who yearns for the burial of his corpse, the Wandering Jew who can find no place to rest his weary head, the magic potion which will keep one forever young and forever beautiful. The supernatural has always persisted in legends and ballads handed down from one generation to another. This taste for the supernatural worked its way back into literature and became an important vogue in the early eighteenth...
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