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Moby Dick, the masterpiece of Herman Melville, which was published in 1851, didn’t attract his contemporary especially the literature critics’ concern. But after his death, the study of Moby Dick has almost exceeded all the other novels in American literature. Moby Dick is a long novel full of morals that it is such profound and set people thinking. The plot of the story is not complex. Through the only survivor of the voyage—Ishmael, he narrates a metaphorical story about the Captain of Pequod Ahab.
Ahab has one purpose: revenge on Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. However, eventually he loses his life and leads the other sailors to death with the white whale. Melville succeeds in expanding the fight between a specific man and a whale to the fight between human and nature, the most dreadful and dangerous ally and enemy. Meanwhile, the writer’s high concern about ecological crisis and human survival could be seen everywhere in the novel.
The thesis gives a study of Moby Dick from ecological criticism by analyzing of main characters, important plots and environmental atmosphere. As a criticism trend, ecological criticism originates from America. The concept when it was put forward could be traced back to the 1970s. It was put forward by Joseph W. Meeker in 1974. His The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology presents the concept and claims that “people should study the relationship between man and other species” and “carefully and seriously examine and explore the literary impact of human behavior and the natural environment”. (Meeker, 1974: 3) In 1996, Glotfelty wrote that “Briefly speaking, Ecological criticism studies the relation between literature and natural environment. Just as feminism criticism starts from gender, investigates the relation between language and literature; Marxist criticism takes production mode, economy and class into the interpretation of text; ecological criticism is based on the Earth to study literature”. (Glotfelty, 1996: 18) To the narrator, ecological criticism means exploring the relationship between human beings and nature from ecological perspective by studying the literature works. 源'自:优尔]'论-文'网"]www.youerw.com
2. Literature Review
As one of the classic novels of romanticism in nineteenth century, Moby Dick is a masterpiece merged adventure, philosophy and research together which has aroused all kinds of people’s great concern. Nowadays there are numerous researches about Melville and his Moby Dick, these researches deeply excavates works of religion, history, politics, aesthetics, linguistics, literature, economy and so on.
In 1940s and 1950s, a large number of reviews on Melville came out. One of the most famous psychological interpretations of Melville’s Moby Dick is Henry Murray’s In Nomine Diaboli. In the article, Murray reveals confusion of modern psychiatric disorders from a psychological point of view of Ahab’s paranoid behavior. In 1950, Newton Arvin published a short biography named Herman Melville, analyzing the magnificent features of Herman Melville and the characteristic structure, symbolism and ambiguous language in Moby Dick.
In china, most of the studies tend to focus on symbolism in Moby Dick, which mainly analyzes major symbols of the novel such as Ahab, the white whale of its whiteness and the only survivor Ishmael. Li Ying’s The Multiple Symbolic Meaning of Moby Dick (Li Ying, 2003: 16) attempts to probe into interpretations of the symbols in Moby Dick, such as the whaling ship Pequod, the whole voyage, Captain Ahab and so on. Besides, Chinese scholar’s study on ecological theory of literature and art has reaped abundantly since 1994 with quite a number of works published. Among which, scholars Lu Shuyuan, Zeng Yongcheng, Wang Nuo are outstanding representatives. Lu Shuyuan’s Ecological Research in Literature and Art (Lu Shuyuan, 2000: 18) advocates trichotomy of Eco-literature, namely natural ecology, spiritual ecology and social ecology.