The canonical whale: 'Moby-Dick' and American literary history

Using recent theories of canonization and historical research, this study examines the complex processes in the twentieth century that canonized Moby-Dick (1851). Herman Melville's novel and its attendant and increasing criticism display the scope and the limits of American criticism and explain why Moby-Dick, a critical and financial failure during Melville's life, has become recognized over the past seventy years as the great American novel.;Critics and academics established the canonical status of Moby-Dick for critical, educational, and historical reasons. Despite recent attempts to reorder and recreate the American canon, as interpretations of the novel have amassed and an academic industry has been created around the novel's status, it has become further entrenched in the canon.;The critics--Carl Van Doren, Raymond Weaver, and Frank Jewett Mather--during the Melville centennial began the processes of canonization as they resurrected Moby-Dick to construct a "usable past" during and after the First World War. In the 1920s, the years in which the Melville revival began, Lewis Mumford first applied a critical method, J. E. Spingarn's organicism, to argue that Moby-Dick was our greatest American epic. Beginning in the 1930s, anthologists of American literature selected the book as a representative text while urging students to use essentially New Critical methods to understand it. After F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance (1941), theorists of American literature used the New Criticism to explicate Melville's book, placing it at the same time at the core of the romantic nineteenth-century American tradition along with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Whitman. Since the early 1960s, Melville scholars have protected the canonical position of Moby-Dick and its approved criticism in the pages of American Literary Scholarship and in the recent Northwestern University-Newberry Library edition of the novel.