Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading

Title: Literature and Moral Reform: Melville and the Discipline of Reading
Format: Book
Publication Date: December 2002
Description:

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By delineating the connections between nineteenth-century penitentiary reforms and the narrative structures and strategies of Herman Melville's fictions, this book explores the ways literature reflects and refracts ideas about the influence of reading on moral rehabilitation. The author shows that Melville, who engaged often and profoundly with reform issues, reacted against the reading-as-discipline approach recommended by penal reformers.

Carol Colatrella's approach is highly original not only in its historicizing of Melville's treatment of penitentiaries, reform, and rehabilitation of moral character but in its consideration of reading in relation to reform. Her book is the first to explore the ideological, literary, and rhetorical relationships of fictional narrative, authors, law, and social institutions to disciplinary literacy and to theories of readership.

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  • School of Literature, Media, and Communication