Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi


Notes on Contributors xii


Acknowledgments xx


Texts and Abbreviations xxi


Preface
Wyn Kelley xxiii


Part I Travels 1


1 A Traveling Life
Laurie Robertson-Lorant 3


2 Cosmopolitanism and Traveling Culture
Peter Gibian 19


3 Melville's World Readers
A. Robert Lee 35


4 Global Melville
Paul Lyons 52


Part II Geographies 69


5 Science and the Earth
Bruce A. Harvey 71


6 Ships, Whaling, and the Sea
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards 83


7 Pacific Paradises
Alex Calder 98


8 Atlantic Trade
Hester Blum 113


9 Ancient Lands
Basem L. Ra'ad 129


Part III Nations 147


10 Democracy and its Discontents
Dennis Berthold 149


11 Urbanization, Class Struggle, and Reform
Carol Colatrella 165


12 Wicked Books: Melville and Religion
Hilton Obenzinger 181


13 Pierre's Bad Associations: Public Life in the Institutional Nation
Christopher Castiglia 197


14 Melville, Slavery, and the American Dilemma
John Stauffer 214


15 Gender and Sexuality
Leland S. Person 231


Part IV Libraries 247


16 The Legacy of Britain
Robin Grey 249


17 Romantic Philosophy, Transcendentalism, and Nature
Rachela Permenter 266


18 Literature of Exploration and the Sea
R. D. Madison 282


19 Death and Literature: Melville and the Epitaph
Edgar A. Dryden 299


20 The Company of Women Authors
Charlene Avallone 313


21 Hawthorne and Race
Ellen Weinauer 327


22 "Unlike Things Must Meet and Mate": Melville and the Visual Arts
Robert K. Wallace 342


Part V Texts 363


23 The Motive for Metaphor: Typee, Omoo, and Mardi
Geoffrey Sanborn 365


24 Artist at Work: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Pierre
Cindy Weinstein 378


25 The Language of Moby-Dick: "Read It If You Can"
Maurice S. Lee 393


26 Threading the Labyrinth: Moby-Dick as Hybrid Epic
Christopher Sten 408


27 The Female Subject in Pierre and The Piazza Tales
Caroline Levander 423


28 Narrative Shock in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and "Benito Cereno"
Marvin Fisher 435


29 Fluid Identity in Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man
Gale Temple 451


30 How Clarel Works
Samuel Otter 467


31 Melville the Realist Poet
Elizabeth Renker 482


32 Melville's Transhistorical Voice: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Fragmentation of Forms
John Wenke 497


Part VI Meanings 513


33 The Melville Revival
Sanford E. Marovitz 515


34 Creating Icons: Melville in Visual Media and Popular Culture
Elizabeth Schultz 532


35 The Melville Text
John Bryant 553


Index 567

About the Author

Wyn Kelley is Senior Lecturer in the Literature Faculty at MIT. The author of Melville?s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and A Short Guide to Herman Melville (Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming), she is also Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan.

Reviews

"This book does not focus on one particular Melville book, short
story, or poem but instead offers a new examination of the latest
in Melville criticism...These fine essays advance Melville
scholarship for the 21st century." Choice

?A beautifully produced substantial volume.?

Reference Reviews