Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!

"Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano" is an 1853 short story by the American writer Herman Melville. It was first published in the December 1853 issue of Harper's Magazine, the same month the second installment of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" appeared in Putnam's.[1] The story remained uncollected until 1922, when Princeton University Press included it in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches.

For the nursery rhyme, see Cock-A-Doodle-Doo.
"Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano"
AuthorHerman Melville
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreShort story
PublisherHarper's Magazine
Publication date
December 1853
Media typePrint
Pages46

Like his later story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" is one of Melville's experiments in utilizing sexually explicit metaphors, in an effort to challenge what Melville saw as a culture of sexual repression and the subjugation of women in contemporary America.

Most scholars agree that this story satirizes Transcendentalist philosophy, in particular Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.[2][3]

References
  1. Warner Berthoff, Great Short Works of Herman Melville (HarperCollins, 1969), p. 75.
  2. Egbert S. Oliver, "'Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!' and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus" (The New England Quarterly, June 1948). https://www.jstor.org/stable/361749.
  3. L. J. Budd and E. H. Cady, On Melville: The Best from American Literature (Duke University Press, 1988), p. 116.
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