A Political Companion to Herman Melville / edited by Jason Frank.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Frank, Jason A., editor.

Series:

Political companions to great American authors

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Political and social views.

Melville, Herman.

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.

Politics and literature--United States--History--19th century.

Politics and literature.

Political and social views.

United States.

History.

Physical Description:

444 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2013]

Summary:

Herman Melville is widely considered to be one of America's greatest authors, and countless literary theorists and critics have studied his life and work. However, political theorists have tended to avoid Melville, turning rather to such contemporaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to understand the political thought of the American Renaissance. While Melville was not an activist in the traditional sense and his philosophy is notoriously difficult to categorize, his work is nevertheless deeply political in its own right. As editor Jason Frank notes in his introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, Melville's writing "strikes a note of dissonance in the pre-established harmonies of the American political tradition." This unique volume explores Melville's politics by surveying the full range of his work--from Typee (1846) to the posthumously published Billy Budd (1924). The contributors give historical context to Melville's writings and place him in conversation with political and theoretical debates, examining his relationship to transcendentalism and contemporary continental philosophy and addressing his work's relevance to topics such as nineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century legal theory, the anti-rent wars of the 1840s, and the civil rights movement. From these analyses emerges a new and challenging portrait of Melville as a political thinker of the first order, one that will establish his importance not only for nineteenth-century American political thought but also for political theory more broadly.

Contents:

1 Introduction: American Tragedy / Jason Frank

2 Who Eats Whom / Kennan Ferguson

3 The End was in the Beginning / Sophia Mihic

4 Chasing the Whale / George Shulman

5 Ahab, American / Susan J. McWilliams

6 Mighty Lordships in the Heart of the Republic / Roger W. Hecht

7 Melville and the Cadaverous Triumphs of Transcendentalism / Shannon L. Mariotti

8 Language and Labor, Silence and Stasis / Kevin Attell

9 Melville's Permanent Riotocracy / Michael Jonik

10 What Babo Saw / Lawrie Balfour

11 Follow Your Leader

12 The Metaphysics of Indian Hating Revisited / Thomas Dumm

13 Melville's War Poetry and the Human Form / Roger Berkowitz

14 The Lyre of Orpheus / Jason Frank

15 Melville's Law / Jennifer Culbert.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813143873

081314387X

OCLC:

837142039