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A. Robert Lee, ed. Herman Melville: Critical Assessments.

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4 vols. in slipcase. Mountfield, Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information Ltd., 2001. xxiv, 2631 pages. 375 [pounds sterling]/ $565.

Since the first collection of critical essays on Melville's writing was published half a century ago, about one more on the average has been brought out annually. If some years were barren, others saw multiple births so that by now at least fifty such anthologies have appeared. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield edited that first collection, a volume of Centennial Essays on Moby-Dick published in 1953; it was followed in less than a year by a special issue of American Literature (January 1954) devoted entirely to Moby-Dick, and in 1960 another anthology of Moby-Dick criticism, edited by Milton S. Stern, was brought out by D. C. Heath as one of their Discussions series. Consequently, we now have available, if not in our personal holdings, then on the shelves of our college and university libraries, several dozen critical anthologies of essays, chapters, extracts, and reviews devoted to the life and writings of Herman Melville.

Not until the new millennium opened three years ago, however, have we had access to so extensive a collection as the one under review here in four exquisitely printed and sumptuously bound volumes edited by A. Robert Lee. It totals 257 entries on over 2631 tightly printed pages, including 24 preliminary pages preceding the General Editor's Preface. This set devoted to Melville's life and works is the nineteenth of such collections published by Helm Information, Ltd., in East Sussex, U.K., as the Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English Series, which commenced in 1990 with a set on T. S. Eliot.

According to Graham Clarke, general editor of the Helm series, the two main aims of these sets are first, to provide an "authorized overview" of the abundant criticism that has been published on the major authors covered since their works first appeared before the public; and second, to make easily available in the four volumes a judicious selection of often inaccessible secondary material. Each set is meant to serve not as "merely a reference text or collection of viewpoints of interest to the antiquarian or literary historian," Clarke says in the Preface, but as a "critical map" that reflects differing points of view over time and stimulates continuing debate and reinterpretations. Scholars should be able to peruse the individual critiques in relation to each other and to the times in which they were written to gain better insight into the development of historical and theoretical criticism of the writings. To be determined, then,...

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