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The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 11,No. 1,Spring 1980 Myth,Melville,andModernity Robert D. Richardson, Jr. Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance. Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1978.309 + ix pp. EdwardH. Rosenberry. Melville. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 170+ xii pp. ThomasJ. Scorza. In the Time Before Steamships: "Billy Budd," the Limits ofPolitics,and Modernity. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979. 210 + xii pp. David Ketterer It is peculiarly appropriate that Herman Melville, perhaps the exemplary figure in American literature, should concern himself with the nature of the exemplary (or phenomenal) character in his final work of fiction, Billy Budd. Hence, it may be assumed, the parallel titles of Warner Bertoff's 1960 article, " 'Certain Phenomenal Men': The Example of Billy Budd," and of the fine book which subsequently included that article, The Example of Melville (1962). In their different ways, the three books under review all focus on the exemplary character of Melville's art. Melville provides the climactic example in Robert D. Richardson's Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance: "Herman Melville was better informed about and more deeply interested in problems of myth than any other American writer of his time" (p. 195). Edward H. Rosenberry, in Melville, notes with irony the 1886 view of a New York newspaper that Melville's career "exemplifie[d] the transiency of literary reputation" (quoted, p. 33). Rosenberry himself sees Melville as the premiere representative of his time and place. In his opening chapter, "The Time of Melville," Rosenberry asserts that Melville's books should be understood as "an allegory of the nation's life, moving collectively - often singly-from youth to age, from innocence to experience, from comedy to tragedy" (p. 1). Alternatively, Thomas J. Scorza's In the Time 74 David Ketterer Before Steamships provides a reading of the lesson to be drawn from the five exemplary characters of Billy Budd. Billy Budd, the person, might, in fact, be viewed as an example of what Richardson distinguishes as the Euhemerist theory of myth (a theory which, incidentally, suggests one way of accounting for the exemplary quality of myth itself) : "a classical Euhemerism explained gods as the result of early man's credulous tendency to worship his ancestors and to exalt great rulers and leaders into deities" (p. 24). Two other theories about the origin of myth have enjoyed currency. According to Allegorism, "myths originate as allegories intended to express primitive conceptions ofNature;" according to Sabeism, "myths arise as a result of primitive worship of heavenly bodies" (p. 23). The more complicated and ambiguous theories of myth that have been devised in the twentieth century are irrelevant to Richardson's purpose which is to offer "an essentially historical view of nineteenth-century American conceptions of myth and its use in literature" (p. 5), specifically the literature of the American Renaissance. Interest in the subject during this period was considerably enhanced by the discovery of Nordic, Oriental and Indic myths. Myth may be valued or denigrated. In an admirably straightforward manner Richardson's first two chapters introduce what may, then, be understood as the two traditional attitudes towards myth. After noting that "the word 'myth' [as opposed to "mythology," meaning the interpretive study of myths] was not used in English until the nineteenth century," Richardson presents an historical anatomy of the arguments for and against. What resulted, it is claimed, in nineteeth-century American literature, "was a creative counterpointing" (p. 10). One important influence on this debate was The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791; first translated, 1802) by Constantine Volney. Volney argues that all religion is to be equated with myth and that all myth is simply falsehood and should be opposed to the truth of history. Richardson traces the skeptical view of myth to the Higher Criticism of the Bible, the attempt to purge "it of its mythical elements in order to arrive at a pure and trustworthy historical core that could command belief in a rationalist age" (p. 21). The affirmative view, of course, holds "myth as 'authentic tidings of invisible things'" (p. 9). In his second chapter, Richardson presents an account of Theodore Parker (one of the key Transcendentalists) and...

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