Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
Considering Herman Melville's keen interest in European philosophy, it seems highly probable that, at one point, he must have become acquainted with the central ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling as well. Even though no solid evidence of his knowledge of Schelling's philosophy can be given, there are several instances in Melville's life that at least suggest this may have been the case. While on his trip to Europe in 1849, for example, he made friends with George J. Adler and Dr. Franklin Taylor, two experts on German literature and philosophy. Their encounter led to a number of nights filled with long conversations on the subject of German Idealism—a pastime Melville himself referred to as “riding on the German horse.”
On October 22 of the same year, moreover, he states in his journal that “[w]e had an extraordinary time & did not break up after two in the morning. We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c were discussed under the influence of whiskey.” That Schelling might also have been a subject of these intense discussions, seems very likely given that he was still giving lectures in Berlin until 1845 and, in addition, was one of the most renowned and influential philosophers in Germany during that time. Furthermore, it is known that Melville possessed an edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which is not only substantially shaped by Schelling's thoughts but also mentions the German philosopher explicitly as one of Coleridge's main influences.
Apart from these biographical instances, however, it is Melville's own literary work which most clearly indicates an intellectual affinity between these two thinkers, if not a clear Schellingian influence on Melville. What is certain is, as Sanford E. Marovitz observes, that there are noticeable “correspondences between Schelling's Of Human Freedom (1809) and Moby- Dick…. Not only elements of the thought but at times even the images are similar.” One of these corresponding images, I am going to argue in this paper, is what Melville calls “the ungraspable phantom of life”7 and what Schelling terms “the indivisible remainder.”
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- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 181 - 198Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021