Back to V., MB's structure post cont.

[Dave Williams]

During the American Renaissance, the proliferation of popular social and imaginative texts was liberating, since it released rich images for literary use, but at the same time it was potentially disturbing, since it threatened to bring about a complete inversion of values and an obliteration of genuine emotion. The major writers sought in their central texts to incorporate as many different popular images as possible and to reconstruct these images by imbuing them with a depth and control they lacked in their crude native state. Uniquely attentive to conflicting voices within their contemporary culture, they transformed a wide array of popular modes and idioms into literary art by fusing them with each other and with archetypes derived from classic literature and philosophy. Their adaptation of an unusual variety of their culture's popular literary strategies made their works time-specific and culture-specific. Their fusion of these strategies with
 classical archetypes aided their effort to lend resonance to themes and devices that remained formless or undirected in their popular form. The density of their best works results from this willed reconstruction and intensification of a varied range of popular images. (3-10) 

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng372/intro-h3.htm

The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Arguing that Melville saw writing as a series of attempts to reach an unreachable union of word and thought ("voicing the voiceless"), Bryant shows how Melville attempted to place the reader in an equivalent condition of "tense repose". He posits that Melville incorporated laughter into his writing as a means of teasing the reader into deeper thought. To this end, Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale, thus creating his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose". Looking closely at Typee, Moby Dick, and The
 Confidence-Man, Bryant offers unique and ground-breaking readings of Melville's work - particularly with respect to the rhetoric of humor and repose, the picturesque, and cosmopolitanism. Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts. 

Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance John Bryant