Exiled royalties : Melville and the life we imagine / Robert Milder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Milder, Robert, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.

Melville, Herman.

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

Literature and society--United States--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Novelists, American--19th century--Biography.

Novelists, American.

Democracy in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (311 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, [England] ; New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Summary:

Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. Conceived separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, the ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life,'" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. Four of the ten essays deal with Melville's life and work after his novelistic career ended with the The Confidence-Man in 1857. The range of issues addressed in the essays includes Melville's attitudes toward society, history, and politics, from broad ideas about democracy and the course of Western civilization to responses to particular events like the Astor Place Riots and the Civil War; his feeling about sexuality and, throughout the book, about religion; his relationship to past and present writers, especially to the phases of Euro-American Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nascent Modernism; his relationship to his wife, Lizzie, to Hawthorne, and to his father, all of whom figured in the crisis that made for Pierre. The title essay, "Exiled Royalties," takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab"--Melville's mythic projection of a "larger, darker, deeper part" of himself. How to live nobly in spiritual exile--to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God--was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. The ways in which this impulse expressed itself through Melville's forty-five year career, interweaving itself with his personal life and the life of the nation and shaping both the matter and manner of his work, is the unifying subject of Exiled Royalties.

Contents:

Contents; Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources; 1. Anticipating Freedom: Melville and Polynesia; 2. The Broken Circle: Melville and (Post-)Romanticism; 3. The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (1): Melville's Metaphysics of Democracy: "Hawthorne and His Mosses""; 4. The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (2): Ishmael's Grand Erections; 5. Exiled Royalties; 6. "The Ugly Socrates": Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience; 7. An Arch between Two Lives: Melville and the Mediterranean, 1856-57; 8. Uncivil Wars

9. Unworldly Yearners: Agnostic Spirituality in Clarel10. Alms for Oblivion; Notes; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-19-028653-9

0-19-971326-X

OCLC:

960165901