Rebecca Stott praises the great 19th-century pre-post-modernist novel Moby-Dick:
It is a creature quite unto itself: a great library of learning contained within the belly of a whale, a key to all mythologies, a joke, a quest, a witch-hunt, a parable, a water eclogue and a warning against the dangers of monomania and what we might call fundamentalism.
Stott compares Melville’s book to an earlier gallimaufry of a novel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.