ABSTRACT
Melville studies has long accommodated a number of different critical methodologies, including aesthetic and historical approaches to the author’s work. In part, this chapter confronts the meta-critical question of historicism’s continued interpretive purchase at a moment when we are witnessing the field-wide resurgence of a “New” Formalism among students of literature. At the same time, by singling out the New Historicist interest in anecdote as a literary form, this chapter not only attempts to reconcile historical and formalist approaches to Melville’s writing generally, it interrogates one of the writer’s specific mid-career novels, Israel Potter (1855), in a synthesizing effort to demonstrate how the “little” narrative vehicle of the anecdote informed the author’s creative investment in smallness.
