"Poetry in Blubber": An Analysis of 19th-century Periodicals’ Reception to Moby-Dick’s Scientific Naturalism

Details

Supervisors

De Bruyn, Ben

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [60] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale

Abstract

This thesis questions the 19th-century reception of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or The Whale. The century experienced a boom in literacy and thus literature and the creation of periodicals, which explains the importance of the literary reviewers, as their opinions largely influenced and inspired the readers. Focusing specifically on the cetological chapters of Melville’s novel, the ones that expose what some call an encyclopedia of the whale species, and gathering a corpus of sixty-seven reviews from 1851 to 1854, I show that these chapters were well-received by the public. More specifically, I gather different perspectives side by side, first by comparing British and American reviews, and then by highlighting these chapters’ most often debated facets because of the reviewer, the periodical, or the country from which each review originated. These analyses will be made under the scopes of Periodical Studies, Reception Theory and Reader-Response Theory, which will also provide arguments to dismantle the reception of these cetological chapters.