"In the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006), Wyn Kelley framed this American author as a Global Melville. While further demonstrating Melville's global reach, the second edition focuses on a Fluid Melville, engaging with new topics, technologies, and approaches that have altered the way we read Melville into the future. Readership of Melville's works has grown since the first edition. Samuel Otter, erstwhile editor of Leviathan, states that, "when I served on the editorial board of American Literature, I was told that they received more submissions on Melville than on any other author" (1). Since the bicentennial celebrations of Melville's birth in 2019, there has been an outpouring of international conferences (New York, Paris, Lisbon, to name a few), as well as of new or forthcoming papers, articles, and books, with titles on Melville and religion, philosophy, science, poetry, technology, and biography. Exciting developments at the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) and Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) place digital editing and archives at the cutting edge of critical approaches to Melville. Melville continues to be featured on university and high-school reading lists, and the Teachers' Summer Institute on " Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age," first offered in 2018 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA, received new funding in 2021 from the National Endowment for the Humanities"--
Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville
A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways.
Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated.
In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hemispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers:
- A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work
- Comprehensive explorations of Melvilles works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel
- Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville
- In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world
- Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement
A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.
Contributors xi
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge
Part I Lives 9
1 Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency 11
John Bryant
2 Melvilles Twentieth-Century Revivals 23
Maki Sadahiro
3 Melvilles Twenty-First Century Lives: Reception and Criticism 36
Brian Yothers
Part II Works 53
4 Typee and Omoo 55
Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
5 Melvilles Mardi: A Certain Something Unmanageable 66
Timothy Marr
6 Discipline and Pleasure in Redburn and White-Jacket 78
Édouard Marsoin
7 Moby-Dick 91
Geoffrey Sanborn
8 Spiritualism in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 102
Hannah Lauren Murray
9 Refugee, Exile, Alien: Israel Potters Migrant Turns 113
Rodrigo Lazo
10 In Other Worlds: Mystery and Method in The Piazza Tales 123
Christopher Sten
11 Art of the Scam: The Confidence-Man 134
Caitlin Smith
12 Lyric Anonymity in Battle-Pieces 147
Tony McGowan
13 Re-writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage
160
Jonathan A. Cook
14 The Fair Poets Name: Late Poems 171
Peter Riley
15 Melvilles Ragged Edges: Billy Budd, Sailor and the Arts of
Incompletion 184
John Wenke
Part III Texts, Print Culture, and Digital Technologies 197
16 A Widow with Her Husband Alive!: Gender, Collaboration, and Melville
Studies 199
Adam Fales and Jordan Alexander Stein
17 Melvilles Cervantes 212
Rosa Angélica Martķnez
18 Melvilles Shakespeare: Survivors and Stepmothers 224
David Greven
19 Melvilles Milton: Of the Devils Party and Knows It 236
Justina Torrance
20 Genre, Race, and the Printed Book 248
Katie McGettigan
21 Melville and Periodical Culture 261
Graham Thompson
22 Mediating Babo 272
Robert K. Wallace
23 Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual 283
Steven Olsen-Smith
24 Counting (on) Melville: Moby-Dick, Computational Literary Studies, and
Dictionary-Based Readings 297
Dennis Mischke
25 Digital Melville: Computation and Dead-Reckoning 313
Christopher Ohge
Part IV Circuits and Systems 329
26 Transatlantic Crossings 331
Edward Sugden
27 Holy Dread: Taboo in Typee and The Whiteness of the Whale 341
Alex Calder
28 Melvilles Spanish: Geopolitics and Language in a Continental Writer
352
Emilio Irigoyen
29 The Pequod as Middle Passage: Melvilles Meditation on the Long
Shipwreck 362
Michael E. Sawyer
30 Melvilles Spectral Mutinies 373
Lenora Warren
31 Religion and Secularity 383
Dawn Coleman
32 Ruthless, Radical Democracy 399
Jennifer Greiman
33 Melville and Masculinity 410
Ellen Weinauer
34 Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and Natural Justice 422
Michael Jonik
35 Tawny Savages and Blank-Looking Girls: Melville, Capitalism, and
Racialized Labor 436
Ivy G. Wilson
Part V The Natural World 445
36 Ocean 447
Richard J. King
37 Verdure 460
Tom Nurmi
38 Anatomy 472
Jennifer J. Baker
39 A Mute Wooing: Animism in Pierre 485
Pilar Martķnez Benedķ and Ralph James Savarese
Part VI Symposium I: Art and Adaptation 497
40 Art and Illustration 499
Matt Kish
41 Anthologizing Moby-Dick; or, Classifying a Chaos 506
Kylan Rice and Elizabeth Schultz
42 On Ekphrasis 512
Dan Beachy-Quick
43 Melville in Film Adaptation: The Lives and Deaths of Pip 519
Jaime Campomar
Part VII Symposium II: Teaching, Learning, and Public Engagement 527
44 Of Whales in Paint: Melville in the High School Classroom 529
Jeffrey Markham
45 Diversity, Reading Publics, and the Community College 535
James Noel
46 Teaching Melville Through the Lens of Popular Culture 541
Martina Pfeiler
47 Visualizing Melville: A Museum Exhibition Perspective 550
Michael P. Dyer Index 559
Wyn Kelley, editor of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Melvilles City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996), Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008), and, with Henry Jenkins, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom (2013).
Christopher Ohge is Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and author of Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience (2021). He also serves as Associate Director of the Melville Electronic Library and an associate editor of Melvilles Marginalia Online, and previously served as an associate editor at the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
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