Melville and Americanness: A Special Issue

Melville and America are the opposite of an odd couple: at least since D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Melville has been considered by many critics as a characteristically American author. In terms of form, political identity, national psychology, and attitudes toward race, class, gender, and sexuality, Melville has been alternately exalted and reviled as either an expression of his nation’s character or as one of its fiercest and most prophetic critics. This identification of Melville with Americanness should come as no surprise, given his range of commentary on the nation and national character throughout his career, from forthright celebration, to muted ambivalence, to outright condemnation of national sins. The rich tradition of reflection on Melville’s relation to America grows out of a central element in his own body of work and partakes of its multiple, sometimes conflicting, impulses.

Lawrence could find Melville’s Americanness in the 1920s in his treatment of race and sexuality as well as his astonishing linguistic inventiveness. Charles Olson could find it his formal use of space in the context of an expanding nation. F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, and Charles Feidelson could find it in the middle of the twentieth-century in his thematic emphasis on democracy and a formal commitment to symbolism and the Romance, even as their contemporary C.L.R. James could locate Melville’s Americanness in his glorification of the working class, immigrants, and racial and ethnic others. Later in the century, Michael Paul Rogin, Donald Pease, Wai-Chee Dimock, and William V. Spanos could find it in varying degrees in his critique of or complicity with the ideological formations of American empire. In much recent scholarship on Melville, going back to the work of T. Walter Herbert and Carolyn Karcher in 1980 and continuing through work by Eric Sundquist, Sterling Stuckey, and Samuel Otter, Melville’s critique of the racial ideologies of nineteenth-century America has been foregrounded.

Given the longstanding debates, Robert S. Levine’s formulation, in the subtitle of his essay, of Melville and Americanness as “a problem” seems entirely apt. The four essays in this special section follow in the vein of recent work by John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, Rodrigo Lazo, Timothy Marr, Geoffrey Sanborn, and Christopher Sten, among others, who consider Melville’s Americanness in relation to the cosmopolitan vision that scholars have increasingly recognized in his work. The essays in this issue both build upon the substantial body of earlier work on various aspects of Melville’s Americanness and also vigorously contest some of the assumptions that the field at times takes for granted.

What could be more appropriate, then, than the international conference in the UK in June 2012 organized by Sarah Thwaites (Univ. of East Anglia), whose speakers addressed the range of Melville’s relationships to “America.” We are honored to publish four essays that had their genesis in talks delivered at that conference, and we would like to thank Sarah Thwaites for her work as guest editor of this special issue as well as her work in convening the conference. The four essays included here all focus on Melville’s relation to America, expressed in both intellectual and material terms, but the focus in each case is broad, rather than narrow. The writers insist on the transnational, trans-lingual, and irreducibly cosmopolitan aspects of Melville’s work, even as they track Melville’s relationship to his own nation and that nation’s relation to the world, in Melville’s time, in our own, and in the intervening years between his moment and ours.

The widest view of Melville’s Americanness and its ambivalences appears in Robert S. Levine’s essay, which has been adapted from his keynote address for the conference. Levine outlines the range of approaches that Melville scholars have taken to the Americaness of his work over time. Using the conceit of “Melville our Contemporary,” which he suggests as a supplementary theme for the conference, and by extension for the investigations implied by Melville’s Americanness, Levine examines the appropriation of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by the recent Occupy movement, finding that in both...