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A New Companion to Herman Melville

Wyn Kelley (Edited by), Christopher Ohge (Edited by)

9781119668503, Wiley

Hardback, published 22 September 2022

592 pages
24.6 x 17.1 x 3.7 cm, 1.191 kg

Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways.

Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated.

In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hem­ispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers:

  • A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work
  • Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel
  • Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville
  • In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world
  • Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement

A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.


Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xix

Introduction 1
Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge

Part I Lives 9

1 Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 11
John Bryant

2 Melville’s Twentieth-Century Revivals 23
Maki Sadahiro

3 Melville’s Twenty-First Century Lives: Reception and Criticism 36
Brian Yothers

Part II Works 53

4 Typee and Omoo 55
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards

5 Melville’s Mardi: “A Certain Something Unmanageable” 66
Timothy Marr

6 Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn and White-Jacket 78
Édouard Marsoin

7 Moby-Dick 91
Geoffrey Sanborn

8 Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 102
Hannah Lauren Murray

9 Refugee, Exile, Alien: Israel Potter’s Migrant Turns 113
Rodrigo Lazo

10 In Other Worlds: Mystery and Method in The Piazza Tales 123
Christopher Sten

11 Art of the Scam: The Confidence-Man 134
Caitlin Smith

12 Lyric Anonymity in Battle-Pieces 147
Tony McGowan

13 Re-writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage 160
Jonathan A. Cook

14 “The Fair Poet’s Name”: Late Poems 171
Peter Riley

15 Melville’s “Ragged Edges”: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Arts of Incompletion 184
John Wenke

Part III Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies 197

16 “A Widow with Her Husband Alive!”: Gender, Collaboration, and Melville Studies 199
Adam Fales and Jordan Alexander Stein

17 Melville’s Cervantes 212
Rosa Angélica Martínez

18 Melville’s Shakespeare: Survivors and Stepmothers 224
David Greven

19 Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It 236
Justina Torrance

20 Genre, Race, and the Printed Book 248
Katie McGettigan

21 Melville and Periodical Culture 261
Graham Thompson

22 Mediating Babo 272
Robert K. Wallace

23 Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual 283
Steven Olsen-Smith

24 Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick, Computational Literary Studies, and Dictionary-Based Readings 297
Dennis Mischke

25 Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning 313
Christopher Ohge

Part IV Circuits and Systems 329

26 Transatlantic Crossings 331
Edward Sugden

27 Holy Dread: Taboo in Typee and “The Whiteness of the Whale” 341
Alex Calder

28 Melville’s “Spanish”: Geopolitics and Language in a Continental Writer 352
Emilio Irigoyen

29 The Pequod as Middle Passage: Melville’s Meditation on the “Long” Shipwreck 362
Michael E. Sawyer

30 Melville’s Spectral Mutinies 373
Lenora Warren

31 Religion and Secularity 383
Dawn Coleman

32 Ruthless, Radical Democracy 399
Jennifer Greiman

33 Melville and Masculinity 410
Ellen Weinauer

34 Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and “Natural Justice” 422
Michael Jonik

35 Tawny Savages and Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism, and Racialized Labor 436
Ivy G. Wilson

Part V The Natural World 445

36 Ocean 447
Richard J. King

37 Verdure 460
Tom Nurmi

38 Anatomy 472
Jennifer J. Baker

39 A “Mute Wooing”: Animism in Pierre 485
Pilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese

Part VI Symposium I: Art and Adaptation 497

40 Art and Illustration 499
Matt Kish

41 Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or, Classifying a Chaos 506
Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz

42 On Ekphrasis 512
Dan Beachy-Quick

43 Melville in Film Adaptation: The Lives and Deaths of Pip 519
Jaime Campomar

Part VII Symposium II: Teaching, Learning, and Public Engagement 527

44 “Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 529
Jeffrey Markham

45 Diversity, Reading Publics, and the Community College 535
James Noel

46 Teaching Melville Through the Lens of Popular Culture 541
Martina Pfeiler

47 Visualizing Melville: A Museum Exhibition Perspective 550
Michael P. Dyer Index 559

Subject Areas: Literature: history & criticism [DS]
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