Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves! Hellenism and Hebraism in Melville's Moby-Dick

Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves! Hellenism and Hebraism in Melville's Moby-Dick

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Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves! Hellenism and Hebraism in Melville's Moby-Dick

dc.contributor.author	New, Elisa
dc.date.accessioned	2011-02-15T20:55:15Z
dc.date.issued	1998
dc.identifier.citation	New, Elisa. 1998. Bible leaves! Bible leaves! Hellenism and hebraism in Melville's Moby-Dick. Poetics Today 19(2): 281-303.	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	0333-5372	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	1527-5507	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4726201
dc.description.abstract	"'Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves!': Hebraism and Hellenism in Melville's Moby-Dick" argues that Herman Melville is Hellenism's severest American critic, and his greatest book, a sustained defense of the Hebraic "letter." Using a range of devices to link his monomaniac, Ahab, with the Greek and Christian subordination of history to reason, Melville exposes the damage to historical knowledge, as well as the characterological and institutional damages, that too singleminded a pursuit of the "spirit" may wreak: In Melville's version, Unitarian ministers and revivalist preachers as well as his own later, allegorizing critics join with Ahab in violent depredations on historical truth. On the other hand, Ishmael, as the essay goes on to argue, is Melville's Hebraist par excellence. Melville draws on Carlyle, on John Kitto's classically historicist Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, and on the Book of Ecclesiastes to fashion Ishmael as a hero of Hebraic restraint and a champion of Hebraic prolixity. Moby-Dick, the great whale, is also Moby-Dick, the redoubtable text, which, in surviving Ahab's assault, sustains the viability of the letter and of history beyond the reach of reason.	en_US
dc.description.sponsorship	English and American Literature and Language	en_US
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.publisher	Duke University Press	en_US
dc.relation.isversionof	http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1773443	en_US
dash.license	LAA
dc.title	Bible Leaves! Bible Leaves! Hellenism and Hebraism in Melville's Moby-Dick	en_US
dc.type	Journal Article	en_US
dc.description.version	Version of Record	en_US
dc.relation.journal	Poetics Today	en_US
dash.depositing.author	New, Elisa
dc.date.available	2011-02-15T20:55:15Z