This work contextualises and details Herman Melville's artistic career and outlines the relationship between Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Michael McLoughlin divides Melville's professional career as a novelist into two major phases corresponding to the growth and shift in his art. In the developmental phase, from 1845 to 1850, Melville wrote his five transcendental novels of the sea, in which he defended self-reliance, attacked conformity, and learned to employ transcendental symbols of increasing complexity. This phase culminates in Moby-Dick, with its remarkable matching of...