Critical studies of Melville—in reviews, biographies, anthologies, and reminiscent essays, and other appreciative essays—predate the critical movement in academia, which accompanied the resurgence of interest known as the Melville Revival beginning soon after World War I.

Since the second world war, the explosion of articles, books, and chapters in books devoted to Melville, his individual works, and impact on world culture, in English and numerous other languages is such that Secondary Bibliographies are themselves book-length. Because our primary interest is in building scholarly editions, our commitment to a suitable, digital, secondary bibliography—one that links listed items to texts and sorts items in various ways—has been put on our developmental backburner, due to the limitations of “Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience.” As a result, and for the time being, the few and seemingly random bibliographical entries we have here are in service to references made in our MEL introductions.

Nevertheless, in hopes of fuller representation of secondary criticism, the MEL Archive opens this space not only to house bibliographical entries related to Melville and digital editing but also as a forum for discussing what a MEL bibliography might be and how our efforts to build it might grow through crowd-sourcing.

Visitors to MEL interested in building our bibliography site, please contact US.