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.
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.
Rodolphe Gasché
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234349
- eISBN:
- 9780823241279
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234349.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical ...
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This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others—namely, philosophy—but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the text and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the book holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or deconstructive, criticism. This book argues that the scenes of production within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors' intentions, stage a work's own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation. In the book's construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, the text not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of argumentation that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it. The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautramont, Nerval, de l'Isle Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville.Less
This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others—namely, philosophy—but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the text and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the book holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or deconstructive, criticism. This book argues that the scenes of production within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors' intentions, stage a work's own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation. In the book's construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, the text not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of argumentation that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it. The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautramont, Nerval, de l'Isle Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville.
Colin Dayan
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691070919
- eISBN:
- 9781400838592
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691070919.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons, the human anomaly constituted by ...
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This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons, the human anomaly constituted by law as property. Melville is obsessed with the making and unmaking of human materials as well as humans and animals. The chapter then assesses what it means in times of torture and dissembling to be like an animal. It all began with chattels. Their treatment helps one to understand the limits of cruelty. They are used as examples when humans need most to categorize, to dominate, and to justify slavery, genocide, and incarceration. The proximity between humans and animals is sometimes tenuous. Boundaries are permeable, and taxonomies are necessary to ensure the order of things. However, when the pressure is on to construct—legally and socially—degradation and inferiority, categories and terminologies get muddled. The hierarchies no longer hold.Less
This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons, the human anomaly constituted by law as property. Melville is obsessed with the making and unmaking of human materials as well as humans and animals. The chapter then assesses what it means in times of torture and dissembling to be like an animal. It all began with chattels. Their treatment helps one to understand the limits of cruelty. They are used as examples when humans need most to categorize, to dominate, and to justify slavery, genocide, and incarceration. The proximity between humans and animals is sometimes tenuous. Boundaries are permeable, and taxonomies are necessary to ensure the order of things. However, when the pressure is on to construct—legally and socially—degradation and inferiority, categories and terminologies get muddled. The hierarchies no longer hold.
Richard Thomas
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195389579
- eISBN:
- 9780199866496
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389579.003.0019
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with ...
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This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with civil discord, examining a disparate group of songs and poems that share a universalizing strategy for representing contemporary civil wars: works reflecting civil war in seventeenth‐century England, nineteenth‐century America, and twentieth‐century Spain. Authors considered include John Denham, Bob Dylan, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Herman Melville, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Stoddard, Robert Lowell, Federico García Lorca, Geoffrey Parsons, and Miklós Radnóti. This strategy is particularly salutary given the need for a literary response to reach readers on (or sympathetic to) both sides; otherwise it risks being propaganda.Less
This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic response to the suffering and loss associated with civil discord, examining a disparate group of songs and poems that share a universalizing strategy for representing contemporary civil wars: works reflecting civil war in seventeenth‐century England, nineteenth‐century America, and twentieth‐century Spain. Authors considered include John Denham, Bob Dylan, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell, Herman Melville, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Stoddard, Robert Lowell, Federico García Lorca, Geoffrey Parsons, and Miklós Radnóti. This strategy is particularly salutary given the need for a literary response to reach readers on (or sympathetic to) both sides; otherwise it risks being propaganda.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/9780198122494.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Like Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins has whetted the appetite for medical villainy, only to dispel the experimenter's Gothic allure by reminding us of the real mundane fallibility of chemists and ...
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Like Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins has whetted the appetite for medical villainy, only to dispel the experimenter's Gothic allure by reminding us of the real mundane fallibility of chemists and doctors: accident, incompetence, timidity, and the paltry distractions of worldly existence all bar the physician's path to heroic transgression. Traps of this kind are a typical parodic ploy of literary realism. From Don Quixote to Ulysses and beyond, the tradition of the novel has relied heavily upon bathetic deflation of romance or sentimentality, but in the nineteenth century this tendency flourished to the point at which it became a dominant novelistic ethic. Among the more promising candidates for this ritual sacrifice of the Romantic ego to the Reality Principle was the figure of the aspiring doctor, anatomist, or chemist.Less
Like Herman Melville, Wilkie Collins has whetted the appetite for medical villainy, only to dispel the experimenter's Gothic allure by reminding us of the real mundane fallibility of chemists and doctors: accident, incompetence, timidity, and the paltry distractions of worldly existence all bar the physician's path to heroic transgression. Traps of this kind are a typical parodic ploy of literary realism. From Don Quixote to Ulysses and beyond, the tradition of the novel has relied heavily upon bathetic deflation of romance or sentimentality, but in the nineteenth century this tendency flourished to the point at which it became a dominant novelistic ethic. Among the more promising candidates for this ritual sacrifice of the Romantic ego to the Reality Principle was the figure of the aspiring doctor, anatomist, or chemist.
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.
Hiram Perez
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479818655
- eISBN:
- 9781479846757
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479818655.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
A Taste for Brown Bodies asks what difference race makes in the emergence of gay modernity. The book examines how the romanticization of the “brown body” continues to shape modern gay sensibilities, ...
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A Taste for Brown Bodies asks what difference race makes in the emergence of gay modernity. The book examines how the romanticization of the “brown body” continues to shape modern gay sensibilities, tracing that brown body to the nostalgic imagination of gay cosmopolitanism. In so doing, the book looks in particular to the queer masculinities of three figures: the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy, themselves proletariat cosmopolitans of sorts. All three of these figures have functioned, officially and unofficially, as cosmopolitan extensions of the US nation-state and as agents for the expansion of its borders and neocolonial zones of influence. The book considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. US empire not only makes possible certain articulations of gay modernity but also instrumentalizes them. The book argues that certain practices and subjectivities understood historically as forms of homosexuality are regulated and normalized in their service to US empire. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—the book proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism.Less
A Taste for Brown Bodies asks what difference race makes in the emergence of gay modernity. The book examines how the romanticization of the “brown body” continues to shape modern gay sensibilities, tracing that brown body to the nostalgic imagination of gay cosmopolitanism. In so doing, the book looks in particular to the queer masculinities of three figures: the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy, themselves proletariat cosmopolitans of sorts. All three of these figures have functioned, officially and unofficially, as cosmopolitan extensions of the US nation-state and as agents for the expansion of its borders and neocolonial zones of influence. The book considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. US empire not only makes possible certain articulations of gay modernity but also instrumentalizes them. The book argues that certain practices and subjectivities understood historically as forms of homosexuality are regulated and normalized in their service to US empire. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries—including Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison—the book proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of “invert” and “homosexual,” occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism.
Michael T. Gilmore
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195157765
- eISBN:
- 9780199787784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195157765.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical ...
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This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical works toy with the edict of knowability, but unlike popular genres, they ultimately reject complete revelation as an illusion. Their protagonists gravitate to inscrutability and hide in plain sight.Less
This chapter considers some of the classics of 19th-century American literature: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and James’s The American. These canonical works toy with the edict of knowability, but unlike popular genres, they ultimately reject complete revelation as an illusion. Their protagonists gravitate to inscrutability and hide in plain sight.
Paul Hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical ...
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American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.Less
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.
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.
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.
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.
Emory Elliott
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195142822
- eISBN:
- 9780199850297
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142822.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
As Lawrence Thomson presents in his work entitled Melville's Quarrel with God, philosophical and religious ideas played no small part in Melville's writings as he expressed questions about God, good ...
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As Lawrence Thomson presents in his work entitled Melville's Quarrel with God, philosophical and religious ideas played no small part in Melville's writings as he expressed questions about God, good and evil, death, the afterlife, and other related topics in his literary works. Although Melville's works gave much emphasis to such issues, ideas regarding his personal faith, his belief in the existence of “God,” and other questions about his religious faith were unclear. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville's friend and fellow writer, attested that although Melville never stopped seeking answers to his questions, he had always believed that everything could reasonably be explained. Although Melville's interest in metaphysical issues persisted, this never undermined the fact that religion is still essential in determining certain principles, moral teachings, and fundamental value systems across several cultures.Less
As Lawrence Thomson presents in his work entitled Melville's Quarrel with God, philosophical and religious ideas played no small part in Melville's writings as he expressed questions about God, good and evil, death, the afterlife, and other related topics in his literary works. Although Melville's works gave much emphasis to such issues, ideas regarding his personal faith, his belief in the existence of “God,” and other questions about his religious faith were unclear. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville's friend and fellow writer, attested that although Melville never stopped seeking answers to his questions, he had always believed that everything could reasonably be explained. Although Melville's interest in metaphysical issues persisted, this never undermined the fact that religion is still essential in determining certain principles, moral teachings, and fundamental value systems across several cultures.
Louis P. Masur (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195098372
- eISBN:
- 9780199853908
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195098372.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, this book captures the reactions, as the American Civil War was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet ...
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Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, this book captures the reactions, as the American Civil War was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott.Less
Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, this book captures the reactions, as the American Civil War was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott.
