Melville's City

Melville's City
Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1996-07-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521560542

She shows that images both from Melville and from popular sources of the time represented New York variously as Capital, Labyrinth, City of Man, and City of God, and she goes on to demonstrate that he resisted a generalizing or totalizing representation of the city by revealing its hybrid identity and giving voice to the poor, the displaced, and the racially excluded.

Melville's Evermoving Dawn

Melville's Evermoving Dawn
Author: John Bryant
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780873385626

This collection of analytical essays is the result of several conferences throughout 1991, the centennary of Herman Melville's death. They survey the past and present of Melville Studies and suggest directions for the future.

Melville's Mirrors

Melville's Mirrors
Author: Brian Yothers
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640140530

An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half. Herman Melville is among the most thoroughly canonized authors in American literature, and the body of criticism dealing with his writing is immense. Until now, however, there has been no standard volume on the history of Melvillecriticism. That a volume on this subject is timely and important is shown by the number of introductions and companions to Melville's work that have been published during the last few years (none of which focuses on the criticalreception of Melville's works), as well as the steady stream of critical monographs and scholarly biographies that have been published on Melville since the 1920s. Melville's Mirrors provides Melville scholars and graduateand undergraduate students with an accessible guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the years. It is a valuable reference for research libraries and for the personal libraries of scholars of Melville and of nineteenth-century American literature in general, and it is also a potential textbook for major-author courses on Melville, which are offered at many universities. BRIAN YOTHERS is the Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso and associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. He is the author of Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass (Camden House, 2016).

Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory

Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory
Author: Brian R. Pellar
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319522671

This book unfurls and examines the anti-slavery allegory at the subtextual core of Herman Melville’s famed novel, Moby-Dick. Brian Pellar points to symbols and allusions in the novel such as the albinism of the famed whale, the “Ship of State” motif, Calhoun’s “cords,” the equator, Jonah, Narcissus, St. Paul, and Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan. The work contextualizes these devices within a historical discussion of the Compromise of 1850 and subsequently strengthened Fugitive Slave Laws. Drawing on a rich variety of sources such as unpublished papers, letters, reviews, and family memorabilia, the chapters discuss the significance of these laws within Melville’s own life. After clarifying the hidden allegory interconnecting black slaves and black whales, this book carefully sheds the layers of a hidden meaning that will be too convincing to ignore for future readings: Moby-Dick is ultimately a novel that is intimately connected with questions of race, slavery, and the state.

Melville and the Question of Meaning

Melville and the Question of Meaning
Author: David Faflik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2018-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351110810

This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville. For if Melville’s concerns with interpretation (the contributors to one recent collection variously read the author for "the ‘meaning’ of the characters," the "meaning" of the "body," "recesses of meaning," "deepest levels of meaning," "double meaning," and the "meaning" of "being" and "everything else") overlap with our own concerns, at a cultural moment when meaning feels especially strained, we have lost sight of the central place of meaning making in Melville’s work. My own readings in Melville are a pedestrian’s guide through the self-conscious complications of meaning we meet with in Melville across a range of different disciplines and endeavors. Combining aesthetics and sociolinguistics, history and theory, rhetoric and politics, philosophy and film studies, Melville and the Question of Meaning demonstrates that the project of making meaning in Melville remains as vital as ever.

Melville's Wisdom

Melville's Wisdom
Author: Damien B. Schlarb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0197585566

"This book explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Melville's work is an example of how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by contemporary theology. Damien Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical scepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace the acumen of modern analytical techniques such as higher biblical criticism, while salvaging simultaneously the spiritual authority of biblical language. Wisdom for Melville constitutes both object and analytical framework in this balancing act. Melville's Wisdom joins other works of postsecular literary studies in challenging its own discipline's constitutive secularization narrative by rethinking modern, putatively secular cultural formations in terms of their reciprocity with religious concepts and texts. Schlarb foregrounds Melville's sustained, career-spanning concern with biblical wisdom, its formal properties, and its knowledge-creating potential. By excavating this project from Melville's oeuvre, Melville's Wisdom shows how he seeks to avoid the spiritually corrosive effects of suspicious reading while celebrating truth-seeking over subversive iniquity"--

Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry

Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry
Author: Peter Riley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198836252

This volume is about the type of work that poets perform and why it matters. Challenging the divide between inspired poetic production and other apparently lesser and contingent forms of labor, this book considers the poetry of Walt Whitman the real estate dealer, Herman Melville the customs inspector, and Hart Crane the copywriter.

A Companion to Herman Melville

A Companion to Herman Melville
Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2015-08-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119045274

In a series of 35 original essays, this companion demonstrates the relevance of Melville’s works in the twenty-first century. Presents 35 original essays by scholars from around the world, representing a range of different approaches to Melville Considers Melville in a global context, and looks at the impact of global economies and technologies on the way people read Melville Takes account of the latest and most sophisticated scholarship, including postcolonial and feminist perspectives Locates Melville in his cultural milieu, revising our views of his politics on race, gender and democracy Reveals Melville as a more contemporary writer than his critics have sometimes assumed

Melville's Monumental Imagination

Melville's Monumental Imagination
Author: Ian S. Maloney
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1135489564

Melville's Monumental Imagination explores the connection between the contested 19th century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors, Herman Melville (1819-1891). The book was written to fill a void in recent Melville scholarship. To date, there has not been a monograph that focuses exclusively on Melville's incorporation of monuments in his fictional world. The book charts the territory of Melville's novels in order to provide a trajectory of the monumental image in one particular literary form. This feature allows the reader to gradually see the monumental image as an important marker that sheds light into Melville's eventual abandonment of long fiction. Melville's Monumental Imagination combines literary analysis and cultural criticism for a long neglected aspect of our nation's iconic development in statuary.

Critical Companion to Herman Melville

Critical Companion to Herman Melville
Author: Carl Edmund Rollyson
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2007
Genre: Authors, American
ISBN: 1438108478

Critical Companion to Herman Melville examines the life and work of a writer who spent much of his career in obscurity.