A New Companion to Herman Melville (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

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. A New Companion to Herman Melville Contents Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Lives 1 Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 2 Melville’s Twentieth-Century Revivals 3 Melville’s Twenty-First Century Lives: Reception and Criticism Part II Works 4 Typee and Omoo 5 Melville’s Mardi: “A Certain Something Unmanageable” 6 Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn and White-Jacket 7 Moby-Dick 8 Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 9 Refugee, Exile, Alien: Israel Potter’s Migrant Turns 10 In Other Worlds: Mystery and Method in The Piazza Tales 11 Art of the Scam: The Confidence-Man 12 Lyric Anonymity in Battle-Pieces 13 Re-writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage 14 “The Fair Poet’s Name”: Late Poems 15 Melville’s “Ragged Edges”: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Arts of Incompletion Part III Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies 16 “A Widow with Her Husband Alive!”: Gender, Collaboration, and Melville Studies 17 Melville’s Cervantes 18 Melville’s Shakespeare: Survivors and Stepmothers 19 Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It 20 Genre, Race, and the Printed Book 21 Melville and Periodical Culture 22 Mediating Babo 23 Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual 24 Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick, Computational Literary Studies, and Dictionary-Based Readings 25 Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning Part IV Circuits and Systems 26 Transatlantic Crossings 27 Holy Dread: Taboo in Typee and “The Whiteness of the Whale” 28 Melville’s “Spanish”: Geopolitics and Language in a Continental Writer 29 The Pequod as Middle Passage: Melville’s Meditation on the “Long” Shipwreck 30 Melville’s Spectral Mutinies 31 Religion and Secularity 32 Ruthless, Radical Democracy 33 Melville and Masculinity 34 Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and “Natural Justice” 35 Tawny Savages and Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism, and Racialized Labor Part V The Natural World 36 Ocean 37 Verdure 38 Anatomy 39 A “Mute Wooing”: Animism in Pierre Part VI Symposium I: Art and Adaptation 40 Art and Illustration 41 Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or, Classifying a Chaos 42 On Ekphrasis 43 Melville in Film Adaptation: The Lives and Deaths of Pip Part VII Symposium II: Teaching, Learning, and Public Engagement 44 “Of Whales in Paint”: Melville in the High School Classroom 45 Diversity, Reading Publics, and the Community College 46 Teaching Melville Through the Lens of Popular Culture 47 Visualizing Melville: A Museum Exhibition Perspective Index EULA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www. wiley.com. 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Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. ## Contents Contributors xi Acknowledgments xix Part I Lives 9 "In the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006), Wyn Kelley framed this American author as a Global Melville. While further demonstrating Melville's global reach, this New companion, with co-editor Christopher Ohge, focuses on a Fluid Melville, engaging with new topics, technologies, and approaches that have altered the way we read Melville into the future. Readership of Melville's works has grown since the first edition. Samuel Otter, erstwhile editor of Leviathan, states that, "when I served on the editorial board of American Literature, I was told that they received more submissions on Melville than on any other author" (1). Since the bicentennial celebrations of Melville's birth in 2019, there has been an outpouring of international conferences (New York, Paris, Lisbon, to name a few), as well as of new or forthcoming papers, articles, and books, with titles on Melville and religion, philosophy, science, poetry, technology, and biography. Exciting developments at the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) and Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) place digital editing and archives at the cutting edge of critical approaches to Melville. Melville continues to be featured on university and high-school reading lists, and the Teachers' Summer Institute on " Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age," first offered in 2018 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA, received new funding in 2021 from the National Endowment for the Humanities" "In the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006), Wyn Kelley framed this American author as a Global Melville. While further demonstrating Melville's global reach, the second edition focuses on a Fluid Melville, engaging with new topics, technologies, and approaches that have altered the way we read Melville into the future. Readership of Melville's works has grown since the first edition. Samuel Otter, erstwhile editor of Leviathan, states that, "when I served on the editorial board of American Literature, I was told that they received more submissions on Melville than on any other author" (1). Since the bicentennial celebrations of Melville's birth in 2019, there has been an outpouring of international conferences (New York, Paris, Lisbon, to name a few), as well as of new or forthcoming papers, articles, and books, with titles on Melville and religion, philosophy, science, poetry, technology, and biography. Exciting developments at the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) and Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) place digital editing and archives at the cutting edge of critical approaches to Melville. Melville continues to be featured on university and high-school reading lists, and the Teachers' Summer Institute on " Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age," first offered in 2018 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA, received new funding in 2021 from the National Endowment for the Humanities"-- Provided by publisher