Table of Contents

1. Melville and Polynesia ; 2. The Broken Circle: Melville and (Post )Romanticism ; 3. The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (1): Melville's Metaphysics of Democracy: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" ; 4. The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (2): Ishmael's Grand Erections _ ; 5. Exiled Royalties _ ; 6. "The Ugly Socrates": Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience _ ; 7. An Arch Between Two Lives: Melville and the Mediterranean, 1856-1857 ; 8. Uncivil Wars _ ; 9. Unworldly Yearners: Agnostic Spirituality in Clarel ; 10. Aims for Oblivion

About the Author

Robert Milder is Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis.

Reviews

"A magisterial work from one of our very best readers of Melville. Robert Milder's beautifully written essays illuminate Melville's views on history, politics, sexuality and religion. But most importantly, they illuminate the grand reach of Melville's tragic art."-Robert Levine, University of Maryland.
"Combining shrewd social and historical analysis with rare psychological, intellectual, and moral insight, these essays, seeking to understand Melville's writing from, as it were, the inside out-form enabling, not just representing, the life imagined-recall the very best criticism of an F. O. Matthiessen or a Newton Arvin. This is creation of its own, in Byron's words, living 'a being more intense.'''-Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara
"Milder's fine chapter on Battle Pieces develops a resonant, complex, and intriguing sense of the relation between Melville's dark sense of the "tragic" adn his political notions of an American democracy, reminding us again of the central place these still-neglected later writings must occupy in any complete understanding of Melville's career and vision."--The New England Quarterly