Reference > Cambridge History > Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I > Fiction II > Ware; Judd
  Moby Dick The Victory of Fiction in the United States  

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The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XV. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I.

VII. Fiction II.

§ 25. Ware; Judd.


Another type of romance which had some vogue during the later years of Cooper was the religious romance, of which, though many essayed it, the chief writers were William Ware (1797–1852), and Sylvester Judd (1813–53). Ware, a clergyman and fair classical scholar, wrote three novels, Letters from Palmyra (1837), later called Zenobia, Probus (1838), a sequel now known as Aurelian, and Julian (1841), which, though strongly biased in favour of the creed Ware preached, and often diffuse and monotonous, had still enough force and charm to have continued to be read by those to whom all books dealing with the origins of Christianity are an equal duty and delight. Judd has not been so widely read as Ware, though generally considered a novelist of superior truth and subtlety. His first novel, Margaret (1845), was born of a desire to show that Unitarians could produce imaginative literature. Its special merits are its vivid fidelity to the life of rural Massachusetts just after the Revolution, its thorough, loving familiarity with the New England temper and scene, and a kind of spiritual ardour which pervades the whole book; but it is badly constructed and it runs, toward the close, into a region of misty transcendentalisms where characters and plot are lost. Richard Edney (1850), a companion piece with its hero a boy and its setting contemporary, suffers, either as narrative or sense, from the same theological obsession, which appears in Judd’s poems as little less than pathological.   28

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  Moby Dick The Victory of Fiction in the United States  
 
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