Search Results

Melville in the Antebellum Publishing Maelstrom

Michael J. Everton

in The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

Chapter 5 illuminates implicit and explicit correlations between trade morality and Christian ethics and particularly the penultimate sociocultural morality of the golden rule. This ... More

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

Moby-Dick and the Opposite of Providence

Maurice S. Lee

in Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American 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 ... More

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

The Prospects for Fiction: Male Romantic Novelists and Women’s Social Reality

Sylvia Jenkins Cook

in Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration

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 ... More

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

Variations on Nature: From the Old Manse to the White Whale

John Gatta

in Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present

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 ... More

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

Introduction

Giles Gunn

in A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

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 ... More

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

Moby-Dick: Chapters 1 – 135

George Cotkin

in Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick

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 ... More

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

Doubting If Doubt Itself Be Doubting: After Moby-Dick

Maurice S. Lee

in Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American 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 ... More

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

Unearthing Pierre

Paul Grimstad

in Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses

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 ... More

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

Melville's Fraternal Melancholies

Elizabeth Barnes

in Love's Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination

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 ... More

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

Was Billy Black? Herman Melville and the Captive King

in On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

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” ... More

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

“Some Things Which Could Never Have Happened”

Catherine Toal

in The Entrapments of Form

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 ... More

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 Romantic Era: Emerson's Churches of One

Matthew Mutter

in Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America's Iminent Secularization from the Puritans to Postmodernity

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 ... More

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

Herman Melville (1819–1891)

Louis P. Masur (ed.)

in “… The Real War Will Never Get in the Books”: Selections from Writers During the Civil War

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 ... More

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

Reading in the Present Tense: Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading

Trish Loughran

in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

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 ... More

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