About White Whale
White Whale is a tool for comparing the works of an author. Repetition of ideas, language, and allusions have struck me as a reader, as I have made my way through Herman Melville's complete works. Not only can you draw lines between the works on topics like sailing, characters finding themselves lost or stuck somewhere, and exploration of exotic locations that lead to inner discovery, but in classical allusions to Ovid and Homer in White Jacket and Mardi or Biblical allusions in Moby-Dick and Clarel (which unfortunately could not be included in the search — see below). I thought it would be helpful to new and seasoned academics and admirers of literature to be able to quickly cross reference between and within works to aid their scholarship and understanding of these texts.
One could compare the use of 'savage' across Melville's works or quickly see how many times 'poison' appears in Shakespeare's plays.
Please keep in mind that the search isn't perfect. It can be slow, especially when searching authors with a large bibliography like Shakespeare's. It also may not be completely accurate. It is based on optical character recognition (OCR) of digitally scanned copies of these texts. The OCR technology isn't perfect and can miss or misconstrue words, so you will want to reference the texts in question yourself, which you can do after searching by clicking on the given page number of a match.