Gothic Melville

In a famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, Herman Melville took the critics to task for missing the darkness as the heart of Hawthorne’s writing – a blackness ‘ten times black’, as Melville put it, that fascinated him. Ironically, Melville has been subject to the same treatment by critics who have in large measure steered clear of Melville’s own darkness. The contributors to Gothic Melville reveal that, if Hawthorne’s darkness is ten times black, then Melville’s is a hundred times so, as his works repeatedly raise questions about what the truth is or if truth exists at all.

This edited collection of scholarly essays makes up for the critical neglect of Melville’s Gothicism by arguing that the Gothic is so extensively interwoven into the fabric of his writing that Melville must at last be recognised as among the genre’s most important practitioners.