Isle of the Cross
"Isle of the Cross" (c. 1853) is a possible unpublished and
Unlike almost all of Melville's other fiction, this work has a female central character.
Background
On a visit to
In a letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne Melville described "the great patience, & endurance, & resignedness of the women of the island in submitting so uncomplainingly to the long, long absences of their sailor husbands," and urged Hawthorne to adopt this "little idea." Hawthorne did not take up the idea, however. Melville worked on the manuscript in the summer and winter of 1852.[3] When Melville took a manuscript to his New York publishers,
Subsequent scholarship
Although Melville's first biographers did not know of its existence, as early as 1922 the writer
Some reviewers of his Herman Melville: A Biography (2002) still objected to Parker's identification of the lost manuscript with "Isle of the Cross".
Cultural references
In the novel The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay, one of the characters, Walter Geist, is secretly purchasing the original manuscript of "Isle of the Cross".[11]
Notes
- ^ Levine (1998), p. xviii.
- ^ a b Parker (1990).
- ^ Parker (2002), pp. 137- 161.
- ^ Pepper (2004), p. 7.
- ^ Parker (2012), pp. 231, 299.
- ^ Hayford (1946), p. 305.
- ^ Sealts (1987), pp. 482–83, 487–90.
- ^ Parker (2002), pp. 137–161.
- ^ Ra'ad (1991).
- ^ Parker (2012), pp. 297, 299-301.
- ^ Rifkind (2007), p. C8.
References
- Hayford, Harrison (1946). "The Significance of Melville's "Agatha" Letters". ELH. 13 (4): 299–310. JSTOR 2871451.
- Levine, Robert S., ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521555715.
- JSTOR 2926778.
- —— (2002). "The Isle of the Cross, September 1852–June 1853". Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. 2, 1851-1891. Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 137–161. ISBN 0801868920.
- —— (2007). "The Isle of the Cross and Poems: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife of Error". Nineteenth-Century Literature. 62 (1): 29–47. .
- —— (2012). Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 9780810127098.
- Pepper, Robert (2004), "Why Harpers "prevented" publication of The Isle of the Cross--one possible explanation.", ISSN 0193-8991, retrieved 3 December 2013
- Ra'ad, Basem L. (1991). ""The Encantadas" and "The Isle of the Cross": Melvillean Dubieties, 1853-54". American Literature. 63 (2): 316–323. JSTOR 2927169.
- Rifkind, Donna (13 March 2007). "Object of Desire". Washington Post. p. C8. Retrieved December 3, 2013.
- ISBN 9780810105508.
External links
- Susan Salter Reynolds (May 26, 2002), "Three Questions for Hershel Parker", Los Angeles Times, p. 3, retrieved December 3, 2013