Author Description

"Clarel, an 18,000-line poem, is one of the longest examples of the "faith-doubt" genre that arose in Victorian times and one that has largely been ignored by Melville critics. Author William Potter argues that Melville's poem Clarel is actually a study in comparative religion - one that explores faith in the post-Darwinian age. It was written at a crossroads in Western thought, when science, technology, nationalism, and imperialism were reshaping the world, and in the process ushered in the modern age. Potter proposes that the poem explains that science may have altered our perception of the world, but it cannot eradicate the basic human need for faith, which is timeless and therefore encompasses far more than the concerns of Western Christianity." "In Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds, Potter examines the poem within a historical context and by so doing endeavors to resolve some of the issues critics claim the poem presents. He reviews the burgeoning field of comparative religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes discussions of many of the theories and ideas of wellknown figures of the time, such as Hegel. Home, Muller, Emerson, Whitman, and Schopenhauer, and attempts to account for the huge abundance of non-Christian material that appears in the poem. He maintains that Melville answers nineteenth-century questions of faith through the heterodoxical themes and ideas shared by all religions and that lie beneath their very different doctrines - redemptive suffering, the tempered heart, and the aversion to worldliness."--BOOK JACKET.