Giles Gunn
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195142822
- eISBN:
- 9780199850297
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142822.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These ...
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This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography, an introduction, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American literature.Less
This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography, an introduction, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American literature.
Neil Rennie
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186274
- eISBN:
- 9780191674471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186274.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
As Samuel Taylor Coleridge noticed, the missionaries who came to the South Seas at the end of the 18th century had changed the image of the South Sea savage. This change he understood as fact ...
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As Samuel Taylor Coleridge noticed, the missionaries who came to the South Seas at the end of the 18th century had changed the image of the South Sea savage. This change he understood as fact replacing fiction. The kind of image Coleridge believed to be fact can be represented by the report of an American missionary, Richard Armstrong, who spent eight months in an attempt to establish a mission on the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas. Much of Armstrong's own experience could not be given as evidence, because ‘the scenes of licentiousness’ he observed ‘were too shocking ever to be narrated by either pen or tongue’. Even the most mundane facts could not be written or read. In the first half of the 19th century, hoever, savages from the same islands were described very differently. And so fact about the savages replaced fiction — ‘frightful tales’. Herman Melville was aware of an affinity between the Typees and that ‘Red race’ of American Indians whom the Puritans had misread in terms of the Bible, as ‘types’.Less
As Samuel Taylor Coleridge noticed, the missionaries who came to the South Seas at the end of the 18th century had changed the image of the South Sea savage. This change he understood as fact replacing fiction. The kind of image Coleridge believed to be fact can be represented by the report of an American missionary, Richard Armstrong, who spent eight months in an attempt to establish a mission on the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas. Much of Armstrong's own experience could not be given as evidence, because ‘the scenes of licentiousness’ he observed ‘were too shocking ever to be narrated by either pen or tongue’. Even the most mundane facts could not be written or read. In the first half of the 19th century, hoever, savages from the same islands were described very differently. And so fact about the savages replaced fiction — ‘frightful tales’. Herman Melville was aware of an affinity between the Typees and that ‘Red race’ of American Indians whom the Puritans had misread in terms of the Bible, as ‘types’.
Neil Rennie
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198186274
- eISBN:
- 9780191674471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198186274.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
The Lucy Ann sailed from Sydney on February 1842 for whales in the Pacific Ocean, and lost eight of its crew and its second mate on the island of Tahuata in the Marquesas, where they deserted in ...
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The Lucy Ann sailed from Sydney on February 1842 for whales in the Pacific Ocean, and lost eight of its crew and its second mate on the island of Tahuata in the Marquesas, where they deserted in June. The Lucy Ann signed on two new sailors at Nukuhiva on August 8th and, on the following day, another, Herman Melville, escaping from the Taipi. The pattern more obviously present in Typee, of escape and captivity, can also be discerned beneath the surface of its sequel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), an apparently unpatterned, wandering narrative with a title Melville glossed in his Preface. Omoo begins where Typee ends, with ‘Melville's’ escape from Nukuhiva in the Julia (in reality the Lucy Ann), and deviates into fiction by describing the Julia's return to the Marquesan island of Tahuata ‘for the purpose of obtaining eight seamen, who, some weeks before, had stepped ashore there from the Julia’, as indeed they had in reality from the Lucy Ann.Less
The Lucy Ann sailed from Sydney on February 1842 for whales in the Pacific Ocean, and lost eight of its crew and its second mate on the island of Tahuata in the Marquesas, where they deserted in June. The Lucy Ann signed on two new sailors at Nukuhiva on August 8th and, on the following day, another, Herman Melville, escaping from the Taipi. The pattern more obviously present in Typee, of escape and captivity, can also be discerned beneath the surface of its sequel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), an apparently unpatterned, wandering narrative with a title Melville glossed in his Preface. Omoo begins where Typee ends, with ‘Melville's’ escape from Nukuhiva in the Julia (in reality the Lucy Ann), and deviates into fiction by describing the Julia's return to the Marquesan island of Tahuata ‘for the purpose of obtaining eight seamen, who, some weeks before, had stepped ashore there from the Julia’, as indeed they had in reality from the Lucy Ann.
Maurice S. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199797578
- eISBN:
- 9780199932412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199797578.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter two shows how chance destabilizes conventional discussions of fate and free will. Beginning with a deeply historicized account of theological and philosophical denials of chance, the chapter ...
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Chapter two shows how chance destabilizes conventional discussions of fate and free will. Beginning with a deeply historicized account of theological and philosophical denials of chance, the chapter turns to Moby-Dick to demonstrate how Melville subverts Christian beliefs in providence and the argument from design, preferring instead to resuscitate concepts of chance as presented in classical and Early Modern scepticism. This chapter also shows how Melville’s knowledge of oceanography, meteorology, and navigation shape his understanding of probability and the potential for managing chance’s disruptive power. We end with a discussion of King Ahab as a figure for anxieties over the possibilities of chance as Moby-Dick resists both formal unity and causal teleology.Less
Chapter two shows how chance destabilizes conventional discussions of fate and free will. Beginning with a deeply historicized account of theological and philosophical denials of chance, the chapter turns to Moby-Dick to demonstrate how Melville subverts Christian beliefs in providence and the argument from design, preferring instead to resuscitate concepts of chance as presented in classical and Early Modern scepticism. This chapter also shows how Melville’s knowledge of oceanography, meteorology, and navigation shape his understanding of probability and the potential for managing chance’s disruptive power. We end with a discussion of King Ahab as a figure for anxieties over the possibilities of chance as Moby-Dick resists both formal unity and causal teleology.
Michael J. Everton
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199751785
- eISBN:
- 9780199896936
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751785.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter 5 illuminates implicit and explicit correlations between trade morality and Christian ethics and particularly the penultimate sociocultural morality of the golden rule. This ...
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Chapter 5 illuminates implicit and explicit correlations between trade morality and Christian ethics and particularly the penultimate sociocultural morality of the golden rule. This Christian-cum-economic morality was really a function of the broader evolution of labor relations as the market attempted to balance capitalism and morality. Yet owing to their prominent roles in the burgeoning nationalism of American literary culture and national economy, publishers figured more prominently than most businessmen in debates over business ethics in the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that the golden rule provided a culturally valuable asset to the early American publishing industry even as it did little to actually regulate the trade, a fact that Herman Melville tried to represent in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), both of which present authors debating the morality of a vocational sphere based on moral fraud.Less
Chapter 5 illuminates implicit and explicit correlations between trade morality and Christian ethics and particularly the penultimate sociocultural morality of the golden rule. This Christian-cum-economic morality was really a function of the broader evolution of labor relations as the market attempted to balance capitalism and morality. Yet owing to their prominent roles in the burgeoning nationalism of American literary culture and national economy, publishers figured more prominently than most businessmen in debates over business ethics in the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that the golden rule provided a culturally valuable asset to the early American publishing industry even as it did little to actually regulate the trade, a fact that Herman Melville tried to represent in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), both of which present authors debating the morality of a vocational sphere based on moral fraud.
Sylvia Jenkins Cook
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195327809
- eISBN:
- 9780199870547
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327809.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter looks at three male novelists who emerged from the romantic movement in America: Sylvester Judd, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. In contrast to the majority of the Dial's ...
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This chapter looks at three male novelists who emerged from the romantic movement in America: Sylvester Judd, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. In contrast to the majority of the Dial's transcendental contributors, all three acknowledged in their writing the dynamic changes in the conditions and aspirations of working-class women and the impact of their intrusion into the cultural and literary discourse of the day. In different ways, each of them reflected in his fiction transformations in literary genre, method, and content in response to this new social consciousness. In doing so, like the working women who contributed to the Lowell Offering, they emphasized the primacy of fiction as a literary mode adaptable both to new authorial concerns and a new reading audience.Less
This chapter looks at three male novelists who emerged from the romantic movement in America: Sylvester Judd, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. In contrast to the majority of the Dial's transcendental contributors, all three acknowledged in their writing the dynamic changes in the conditions and aspirations of working-class women and the impact of their intrusion into the cultural and literary discourse of the day. In different ways, each of them reflected in his fiction transformations in literary genre, method, and content in response to this new social consciousness. In doing so, like the working women who contributed to the Lowell Offering, they emphasized the primacy of fiction as a literary mode adaptable both to new authorial concerns and a new reading audience.
Giles Gunn
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195142822
- eISBN:
- 9780199850297
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142822.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
One of the best words to describe Herman Melville's reputation, especially among other American writers, is colossus for he has been able to contribute in no small part to the classic literature of ...
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One of the best words to describe Herman Melville's reputation, especially among other American writers, is colossus for he has been able to contribute in no small part to the classic literature of the nineteenth century. Although he might have been outwritten by other prominent authors such as Mark Twain and Henry James, among others, Herman Melville managed to write some of the most significant and more ambitious stories in both prose and poetry, such as Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, Moby Dick, and Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land to name a few. Aside from taking on a multitude of various themes and issues, Melville's works complied with a common theme that involves consuming and creating, brought about by Melville's belief that art was meant to be perceived as a semireligious assertion that art reflects the most important aspects of life and experience.Less
One of the best words to describe Herman Melville's reputation, especially among other American writers, is colossus for he has been able to contribute in no small part to the classic literature of the nineteenth century. Although he might have been outwritten by other prominent authors such as Mark Twain and Henry James, among others, Herman Melville managed to write some of the most significant and more ambitious stories in both prose and poetry, such as Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, Moby Dick, and Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land to name a few. Aside from taking on a multitude of various themes and issues, Melville's works complied with a common theme that involves consuming and creating, brought about by Melville's belief that art was meant to be perceived as a semireligious assertion that art reflects the most important aspects of life and experience.
John Gatta
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195165050
- eISBN:
- 9780199835140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195165055.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence ...
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Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.Less
Among the divergent forms of nature writing that flourished in nineteenth-century America, the “Old Manse” preface by Hawthorne reflects a distinctive mood of contentment about the author’s residence in Concord, Massachusetts. This essay’s conception of nature is based not on a wilderness aesthetic, but on a pastoral sense of human interaction with the green world—a sense that Hawthorne associates in turn with Christian theological terms of grace and incarnation. The holiness of gardening likewise informs writing of this period by women such as Celia Thaxter and Margaret Fuller. The religious intensity of Walt Whitman’s ecopoetic worldview, epitomized by “Song of Myself,” ranges from the astronomical heights to the lowly plants mentioned in section 5 of this poem. Unlike Whitman’s oceanic poems, Herman Melville’s portrayal of the sea in Moby-Dick exposes nature’s underlying savagery and vulturism—but also raises deep questions about the divinely inscrutable freedom of Creation embodied by the great white whale.
Maurice S. Lee
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199797578
- eISBN:
- 9780199932412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199797578.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter shows how Melville continued to explore chance after Moby-Dick, especially as Pierre and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” take up the challenge up moral action under conditions of causal ...
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This chapter shows how Melville continued to explore chance after Moby-Dick, especially as Pierre and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” take up the challenge up moral action under conditions of causal uncertainty. Melville’s suspension of judgment regarding chance proves as radical as any political position he might take, and it moves him toward a pragmatism that, more than anything in William James, dwells on the tragic potential of willing to believe. A key concept in this chapter is the paradox of “Buridan’s Ass,” a problem confronted by philosophers from classical skeptics through Montaigne and Bayle to Jonathan Edwards and Spinoza. If Moby-Dick elaborates on the philosophical and theological implications of chance, Melville’s later work is more committed to the moral and aesthetic consequences of acknowledging—or refusing to acknowledge—chance’s power.Less
This chapter shows how Melville continued to explore chance after Moby-Dick, especially as Pierre and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” take up the challenge up moral action under conditions of causal uncertainty. Melville’s suspension of judgment regarding chance proves as radical as any political position he might take, and it moves him toward a pragmatism that, more than anything in William James, dwells on the tragic potential of willing to believe. A key concept in this chapter is the paradox of “Buridan’s Ass,” a problem confronted by philosophers from classical skeptics through Montaigne and Bayle to Jonathan Edwards and Spinoza. If Moby-Dick elaborates on the philosophical and theological implications of chance, Melville’s later work is more committed to the moral and aesthetic consequences of acknowledging—or refusing to acknowledge—chance’s power.
George Cotkin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199855735
- eISBN:
- 9780190252885
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199855735.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter presents Chapters 1–135 of Moby-Dick, beginning with the opening line “Call Me Ishmael” that introduces readers to the narrator and his story about the White Whale and Captain Ahab. The ...
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This chapter presents Chapters 1–135 of Moby-Dick, beginning with the opening line “Call Me Ishmael” that introduces readers to the narrator and his story about the White Whale and Captain Ahab. The novel ends with Ahab's final encounter with the whale, culminating in the death of the animal and everyone on the ship Pequod except Ishmael, who floats atop the coffin of the harpooner named Queequeg.Less
This chapter presents Chapters 1–135 of Moby-Dick, beginning with the opening line “Call Me Ishmael” that introduces readers to the narrator and his story about the White Whale and Captain Ahab. The novel ends with Ahab's final encounter with the whale, culminating in the death of the animal and everyone on the ship Pequod except Ishmael, who floats atop the coffin of the harpooner named Queequeg.
Elizabeth Barnes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834565
- eISBN:
- 9781469603346
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807877968_barnes
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to “love one's neighbor as oneself” with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, ...
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Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to “love one's neighbor as oneself” with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, this book focuses its attention on aggressors—rather than the weak or abused—to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture. Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, the author shows how violence and sensibility work together to produce a more “sensitive” citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful protagonist identifies with the person he harms. The author argues that this identification and emotional transformation come at a high price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's blood. Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian culture in the United States.Less
Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to “love one's neighbor as oneself” with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression, including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian removal, this book focuses its attention on aggressors—rather than the weak or abused—to suggest ways of understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence, and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century American culture. Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, the author shows how violence and sensibility work together to produce a more “sensitive” citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful protagonist identifies with the person he harms. The author argues that this identification and emotional transformation come at a high price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's blood. Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal, Christian culture in the United States.
Paul Grimstad
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199874071
- eISBN:
- 9780199345465
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199874071.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter looks at how Melville reacted to reviews for Moby-Dick by adding pages to the finished manuscript of Pierre, and considers Melville’s use of allegory. It also looks in detail at ...
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This chapter looks at how Melville reacted to reviews for Moby-Dick by adding pages to the finished manuscript of Pierre, and considers Melville’s use of allegory. It also looks in detail at Melville’s prose style circa 1851-1852.Less
This chapter looks at how Melville reacted to reviews for Moby-Dick by adding pages to the finished manuscript of Pierre, and considers Melville’s use of allegory. It also looks in detail at Melville’s prose style circa 1851-1852.
Elizabeth Barnes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834565
- eISBN:
- 9781469603346
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807877968_barnes.6
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter shows how Herman Melville pursues a theme recurrent throughout his fiction: that of the suffering of politically, socially, and emotionally vulnerable white men. In White-Jacket, or The ...
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This chapter shows how Herman Melville pursues a theme recurrent throughout his fiction: that of the suffering of politically, socially, and emotionally vulnerable white men. In White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-Of-War, this idea is specifically located in what Melville views as the degrading effects of naval flogging on the common sailor. Although acknowledging the necessity of a code of government at sea “more stringent than the law that governs the land,” Melville's eponymous narrator nevertheless contends that “that code should conform to the spirit of the political institutions of the country that ordains it. It should not convert into slaves some of the citizens of a nation of freemen.”Less
This chapter shows how Herman Melville pursues a theme recurrent throughout his fiction: that of the suffering of politically, socially, and emotionally vulnerable white men. In White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-Of-War, this idea is specifically located in what Melville views as the degrading effects of naval flogging on the common sailor. Although acknowledging the necessity of a code of government at sea “more stringent than the law that governs the land,” Melville's eponymous narrator nevertheless contends that “that code should conform to the spirit of the political institutions of the country that ordains it. It should not convert into slaves some of the citizens of a nation of freemen.”
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823229406
- eISBN:
- 9780823240982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823229406.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
Melville summarizes a figurative tradition begun with Behn and continued in the work of Equiano. He circulates the figure of the black sovereign — in Daggoo, in Atufal, in a certain “black pagod” ...
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Melville summarizes a figurative tradition begun with Behn and continued in the work of Equiano. He circulates the figure of the black sovereign — in Daggoo, in Atufal, in a certain “black pagod” encountered on the Liverpool docks — as part of a lifelong attempt to think through the antinomies of the modern self and its ensnarement in the mysteries of domination and subjection. Like Aphra Behn, Melville takes the problem of sovereignty as one of his basic themes. But what must be discerned around the edges of Behn's new world texts, namely, the knowledge, unhappily discovered, that in the post-absolutist modernity in which she found herself, sovereignty had become subordinated to an ideology of individualism, is for Melville the starting point: sovereignty, for this intense individualist, is first and foremost a trait, or difficult achievement, of the self. Political realities, or what he calls the “old State-secret,” cannot be separated from issues of individuals in their relation to other individuals.Less
Melville summarizes a figurative tradition begun with Behn and continued in the work of Equiano. He circulates the figure of the black sovereign — in Daggoo, in Atufal, in a certain “black pagod” encountered on the Liverpool docks — as part of a lifelong attempt to think through the antinomies of the modern self and its ensnarement in the mysteries of domination and subjection. Like Aphra Behn, Melville takes the problem of sovereignty as one of his basic themes. But what must be discerned around the edges of Behn's new world texts, namely, the knowledge, unhappily discovered, that in the post-absolutist modernity in which she found herself, sovereignty had become subordinated to an ideology of individualism, is for Melville the starting point: sovereignty, for this intense individualist, is first and foremost a trait, or difficult achievement, of the self. Political realities, or what he calls the “old State-secret,” cannot be separated from issues of individuals in their relation to other individuals.
Catherine Toal
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823269341
- eISBN:
- 9780823269396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823269341.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The numerous interpretations of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno show a sharp divide between nervousness about the apparent racism of its representation of rebelling slaves (inferred from its emphasis ...
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The numerous interpretations of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno show a sharp divide between nervousness about the apparent racism of its representation of rebelling slaves (inferred from its emphasis on their violence, which includes an insinuation of cannibalism) and the belief that the story challenges us to cultivate sympathy for their plight. The chapter argues that this hermeneutic controversy ignores the tale’s central feature, the main embellishment Melville added to his source: the skeleton of the slave owner placed on the prow of the ship and covered throughout most of the action. The introduction of this device transforms the narrative into a dramatization of a fundamental American contradiction noted by Tocqueville, between the “sympathy” that pervades exchanges between people of all social levels and the “cruelty” with which Americans treat their slaves. Melville’s gesture converts democratizing “sympathy” itself into cruelty, by exposing its racialized basis.Less
The numerous interpretations of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno show a sharp divide between nervousness about the apparent racism of its representation of rebelling slaves (inferred from its emphasis on their violence, which includes an insinuation of cannibalism) and the belief that the story challenges us to cultivate sympathy for their plight. The chapter argues that this hermeneutic controversy ignores the tale’s central feature, the main embellishment Melville added to his source: the skeleton of the slave owner placed on the prow of the ship and covered throughout most of the action. The introduction of this device transforms the narrative into a dramatization of a fundamental American contradiction noted by Tocqueville, between the “sympathy” that pervades exchanges between people of all social levels and the “cruelty” with which Americans treat their slaves. Melville’s gesture converts democratizing “sympathy” itself into cruelty, by exposing its racialized basis.
Chris Baldick
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122494
- eISBN:
- 9780191671432
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122494.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations that we find at work in Frankenstein. The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though, lay in the European and ...
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Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations that we find at work in Frankenstein. The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though, lay in the European and American short-story tradition, where the emergent sub-genres of horror story, science fiction, and detective tale mingled productively in the early part of the century. In many of the best tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, artists of various kinds discover the destructive and damning qualities of their own creations. What is repeatedly shown in these tales of transgression is how the secret skill that makes the protagonist independent and severs his social ties becomes an obsessional end in itself and masters the master. It is not just that, as a matter of their personal experience, Herman Melville was able to describe actual labour whereas Elizabeth Gaskell could give us only the domestic sickbed or the riot at the factory gates.Less
Mary Shelley was not alone in fictionalizing the various preoccupations that we find at work in Frankenstein. The more familiar home of such Frankensteinian themes, though, lay in the European and American short-story tradition, where the emergent sub-genres of horror story, science fiction, and detective tale mingled productively in the early part of the century. In many of the best tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, artists of various kinds discover the destructive and damning qualities of their own creations. What is repeatedly shown in these tales of transgression is how the secret skill that makes the protagonist independent and severs his social ties becomes an obsessional end in itself and masters the master. It is not just that, as a matter of their personal experience, Herman Melville was able to describe actual labour whereas Elizabeth Gaskell could give us only the domestic sickbed or the riot at the factory gates.
Louis P. Masur (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195098372
- eISBN:
- 9780199853908
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195098372.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Herman Melville published nine books and a collection of stories, including Moby-Dick, a book he loved but the critics failed to understand. Near the end of the conflict of the Civil War, Melville ...
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Herman Melville published nine books and a collection of stories, including Moby-Dick, a book he loved but the critics failed to understand. Near the end of the conflict of the Civil War, Melville found his subject and voice. Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War consists of seventy-one poems and a prose supplement. A complex work, the poems of Battle-Pieces attempted to tell in chronological order the stories of the Civil War. In the “Supplement,” he asks his readers to consider the plausibility of the Southern position on the eve of war. He acknowledges the “atheistical iniquity” of slavery, but the freedmen are not his primary concern. It is not that he desired to abandon blacks. However, he believed that the bitterness between sections had to be eliminated if there was ever to be cooperation between races.Less
Herman Melville published nine books and a collection of stories, including Moby-Dick, a book he loved but the critics failed to understand. Near the end of the conflict of the Civil War, Melville found his subject and voice. Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War consists of seventy-one poems and a prose supplement. A complex work, the poems of Battle-Pieces attempted to tell in chronological order the stories of the Civil War. In the “Supplement,” he asks his readers to consider the plausibility of the Southern position on the eve of war. He acknowledges the “atheistical iniquity” of slavery, but the freedmen are not his primary concern. It is not that he desired to abandon blacks. However, he believed that the bitterness between sections had to be eliminated if there was ever to be cooperation between races.
Trish Loughran
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156172
- eISBN:
- 9780231520775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156172.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers the long historical reception of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno first as a theoretical problem across time (giving special attention to a remarkable number of presentist or ...
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This chapter considers the long historical reception of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno first as a theoretical problem across time (giving special attention to a remarkable number of presentist or present-tense readings of the text) and then as a more local matter in Melville's own moment. It starts with the presentist reception of the novella for two reasons: first, because Benito Cereno has generated, over time, a remarkably high number of historically unhinged readings and, second, because critical presentism has become one of the signal gestures of our own contemporary practice in American studies. Thus, we might say that the chapter is not exempt from the presentist gesture it describes, but it is going to try to think about it and theorize it as something that has a distinct origin, in this case, in the story itself and in the world in which Melville lived—and wrote. In the end, the chapter is an experiment in how to think about aesthetic reception in ways that are both theoretical and materialist at once.Less
This chapter considers the long historical reception of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno first as a theoretical problem across time (giving special attention to a remarkable number of presentist or present-tense readings of the text) and then as a more local matter in Melville's own moment. It starts with the presentist reception of the novella for two reasons: first, because Benito Cereno has generated, over time, a remarkably high number of historically unhinged readings and, second, because critical presentism has become one of the signal gestures of our own contemporary practice in American studies. Thus, we might say that the chapter is not exempt from the presentist gesture it describes, but it is going to try to think about it and theorize it as something that has a distinct origin, in this case, in the story itself and in the world in which Melville lived—and wrote. In the end, the chapter is an experiment in how to think about aesthetic reception in ways that are both theoretical and materialist at once.
Matthew Mutter
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195342536
- eISBN:
- 9780199867042
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195342536.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the ...
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This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.Less
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.
Geoffrey Sanborn
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199751693
- eISBN:
- 9780199894819
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751693.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, World Literature
This book combines history, biography, and close reading to produce radically new interpretations of two of the most important novels in American history. After an introductory chapter ...
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This book combines history, biography, and close reading to produce radically new interpretations of two of the most important novels in American history. After an introductory chapter on the early nineteenth-century image of the Maori, the book demonstrates, in a series of interlinked chapters, that Magua in The Last of the Mohicans and Queequeg in Moby-Dick were modeled on Maori chiefs. In a sharp reversal of the conventional understanding of Magua, the book argues that Cooper means us to see him not as a villainous “bad Indian” but as a fiercely majestic and intelligent “gentleman.” Like the massacre led by Te Ara, the Maori chief on whom Magua was based, the massacre led by Magua is represented as an example of why aristocrats, white or non-white, should be exempted from humiliatingly vulgar punishments. In the chapter on Moby-Dick, the book argues that the story of Te Pehi Kupe, a Maori chief who boarded a ship and became intimate with its captain, inspired Melville to turn Queequeg, originally a prop in a comic, democratic, humanist anecdote, into an icon of epic republican idealism. Breaking with the usual conception of Queequeg as an embodiment of loving companionship, the book shows that what he stands for above all else is “mortal greatness”—a loftiness that is at least latent in every one of us—and the buoyancy of spirit that sustains it.Less
This book combines history, biography, and close reading to produce radically new interpretations of two of the most important novels in American history. After an introductory chapter on the early nineteenth-century image of the Maori, the book demonstrates, in a series of interlinked chapters, that Magua in The Last of the Mohicans and Queequeg in Moby-Dick were modeled on Maori chiefs. In a sharp reversal of the conventional understanding of Magua, the book argues that Cooper means us to see him not as a villainous “bad Indian” but as a fiercely majestic and intelligent “gentleman.” Like the massacre led by Te Ara, the Maori chief on whom Magua was based, the massacre led by Magua is represented as an example of why aristocrats, white or non-white, should be exempted from humiliatingly vulgar punishments. In the chapter on Moby-Dick, the book argues that the story of Te Pehi Kupe, a Maori chief who boarded a ship and became intimate with its captain, inspired Melville to turn Queequeg, originally a prop in a comic, democratic, humanist anecdote, into an icon of epic republican idealism. Breaking with the usual conception of Queequeg as an embodiment of loving companionship, the book shows that what he stands for above all else is “mortal greatness”—a loftiness that is at least latent in every one of us—and the buoyancy of spirit that sustains it.
