Moby-Dick

The failure of Moby-Dick to become popular when published in 1851, and its subsequent resurrection in the 1920s, is an abiding mystery.  One school of literary criticism argues that the slaughters of World War I profoundly altered human consciousness and produce intellectual and artistic "modernity".  The timing works to explain the rediscovery of Moby-Dick, but the putative explanation begs the question why the Civil War, being comparably ghastly, more proximate in time and more im...