Melville

Much of this year’s prodigious output of scholarship on Herman Melville continues to feature transnationalist subjects and perspectives, with the appearance of two substantial collections based on papers presented at international conferences sponsored by the Melville Society in Poland (2007) and Jerusalem (2009). A third collection breaks new ground by focusing on theoretical approaches to the subject of Melville’s aesthetics. Moby-Dick attracted the most critical attention, with 17 articles and book chapters, while Clarel inspired 14, 12 in a single issue of Leviathan. Three monographs appeared this year, the most notable being an examination of the appropriation of Maori culture in Moby-Dick (and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans) and a postmodern critique of “American exceptionalism” in Billy Budd.

i Biographies, Editions, and Reference Works

In “Melville Reviews and Notices, Continued” (Leviathan 13, i: 88–115) Scott Norsworthy collects 78 new reviews, notices, and mentions discovered by Richard E. Winslow III mostly in microfilms of 19th-century newspapers and periodicals, plus a few items found through Internet resources. As Norsworthy observes, this collection supplements an earlier collection documented by Winslow and Mark Wojnar in Melville Society Extracts (see AmLS 2003, p. 48) and adds to the bibliographical Checklist of Melville Reviews, ed. Kevin Hayes and Hershel Parker (AmLS 1991, p. 61), as well as the collection of transcribed documents in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Parker (AmLS 1995, pp. 51–52). Norsworthy notes that White-Jacket receives 13 reviews or notices in this compilation (the largest number), while Redburn gets none, and he identifies other highlights, such as the full review of Typee from the 28 March 1846 issue of Western Continent, ed. Park Benjamin, previously known only in the form of excerpts in contemporary advertisements. While some reviews acknowledge Melville’s storytelling powers, others recognize his skills as a poet, dramatist, or “philosopher.” Norsworthy also points out the value of collecting reprints of reviews, especially when they provide legible versions of text that is indecipherable in other versions, and the importance of studying variant notices as well. And he highlights the three items located in electronic databases, such as an 1877 review of Clarel in the London Literary World.

ii General

Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn have edited an important collection of essays, Melville and Aesthetics (Palgrave), which attempts to revive an interest in aesthetic readings of Melville but in the context of a “radically democratic politics,” embracing a wide range of “experiments” in an approach to critical analysis that has traditionally been innocent of social, sensuous, and political considerations. Contributors to this volume were not asked to subscribe to a common set of critical assumptions but to share a set of questions, such as, “How might one draw connections between aesthetic analysis and cultural and historical analysis?” Alex Calder in “Blubber: Melville’s Bad Writing” (pp. 11–31) opens with the eye-catching claim that while many of America’s greatest authors are known for writing badly, “Melville has written more badly than most,” though he quickly adds that this “seems part of what makes him a great writer in the first place.” Calder sets out to explain the process by which the extravagant, rhapsodic qualities in Melville’s writing were regarded as liabilities in his own time but are now seen as signs of greatness, while books once thought to be “botches” are now viewed as masterpieces. While acknowledging the importance of changing conceptions of “artistic form,” Calder also looks to cultural explanations such as the “rise and fall of interpretive communities” and the “role of institutions in canon formation.” Still, Calder concludes that “bad writing tended to work positively for Melville,” providing much-needed “psychic insulation” and “vitalizing the text.” In “Melvillean Provocation and the Critical Art of Devotion” (pp. 49–63) Andrew DuBois explores half a dozen well-known experiments in Melville criticism, from Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953) to Frank Lentricchia’s Lucchesi and the Whale (AmLS 2001, p. 56) and K. L. Evans’s Whale! (AmLS 2003, pp. 50–51...