Blurb for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative

by Hershel Parker

Northwestern University Press | December 18, 2012 | Hardcover 

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker's history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville's disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimizing his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the "divine amateurs" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.

There is a fourth part to the book that may interest anyone concerned with biography in general, not just Melville biography. The endnotes constitute a symposium in which views of many biographers, most often British, are tested against Parker's experiences with Melville. Topics include theories which relate biography to fiction, invasions of privacy by biographers, the idea that the biographer enacts a kind of countertransference, the recklessness of the "Brainstorm" site of the Chronicle of Higher Education,the problem of gaps in evidence, the constrictive power of prior knowledge, the importance of working in small "time-spans," the New Critical faith in the sanctity of texts, the folly of seizing on one determinative turning-point, the redefining of archives out of existence, the question of suitable tone and language, strategies for not confusing fiction with autobiography, the occasional necessity to make "exposition simulate narrative," the serendipitous finding something significant while looking for something else, the seeming "fact" which undercuts an elaborate theory, the specter of the rival biographer, the group therapy that occurs when biographers talk about reviewers, the folly of seeking the "essence" of one's subject. By listening to the voices of dozens of biographers excitedly describing their working methods, their obstacles, and their triumphs, Parker makes his inside narrative an essential resource for biographers and students of biography.