Melville

A monograph by Robert Milder, a study of the Kraken edition of Pierre by Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins, three essay collections, including Haskell Springer and Elizabeth Schultz’s pathbreaking Melville and Women, and several new editions of the prose and poetry, as well as a special issue of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance titled “Melville in the Marquesas” and two special issues of Leviathan titled “Melville and Japan” and “Melville and Disability,” make this a busy year for Melville studies. For the most part, this is more a period of reassessment and consolidation than of bold new initiatives: established scholars revise and extend previously published work, busy editors gather conference papers into single volumes, and too many writers revisit familiar issues without acknowledging the wealth of previous scholarship on their topics or developing well-supported views of their own. A clutch of stimulating articles on the short fiction is a welcome exception to this last generalization.

i Biographies, Editions, and Reference Works

Four new editions of Melville’s works debuted this year, three of them classroom texts and one an indispensable tool for studying his poetry. As the first entry in the new series of Longman Critical Editions, Moby-Dick, ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer (Longman), presents the novel according to Bryant’s theories of the “fluid text” by graphically highlighting changes between the American and British editions and providing brief in-text “revision narratives” that discuss each alteration. This format distinguishes this edition from all others and invites readers to consider the novel as a negotiation between the author and his twin audiences, readers in 1851 and those today. The unusual formatting also calls attention to the subtleties of Melville’s language, style, humor, sexual puns, and religious references. Brief annotations on facing pages are complemented by back matter with thorough explanatory notes, twelve diagrams and illustrations, a nautical glossary, and lists of sources and textual emendations not discussed, making this a complete text for instructors who wish to involve students more deeply in the production of and revisions to Melville’s text. Benito Cereno, ed. Wyn Kelley (Bedford), has a nicely illustrated introduction that places the story firmly in its historical and literary context, a lightly annotated reprint of the Northwestern-Newberry text, and an appendix with chapter 18 of Amasa Delano’s Narrative. Compact yet complete, this is a handy classroom edition geared especially toward introductory courses in writing about literature. A second edition of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer (Norton), thoroughly revises and updates Parker’s 1971 Norton Critical Edition. It is 100 pages longer and excises the most dated critical essays and least relevant sources while adding eight new interpretive, biographical, and source studies that appear here for the first time. Also important are essays on Melville’s revisions, eight new contemporary reviews, and several reprinted excerpts from Parker’s biography with information about Melville’s dire poverty and his interest in aesthetics. One new section exposes Melville’s implicit debate about charity with the Rev. Orville Dewey, and another reorganizes new and old material around the history and politics of “Indian-hating.” The edition retains most of its materials on Melville’s relations with the Transcendentalists and Nathaniel Hawthorne. A beautiful edition of John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces, ed. Douglas Robillard (Kent State), is styled a “facsimile edition,” but rather than reproducing an exact copy of Melville’s privately printed edition Robillard offers something more useful: photostats of the original volume, the printer’s copy in Melville’s handwriting, six pages of galley proofs, and ten pages of page proofs, all with Melville’s corrections, emendations, and commentary. Two appendixes publish Melville’s fair copy of “The Admiral of the White” and the assignment of copyright to Elizabeth Melville. Robillard’s substantial introductions to each section chart the path for further study of these important texts, manuscripts, and marginalia.

A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Blackwell), promises to become the new starting place for Melville studies. Thirty-five original essays emphasize Melville’s global reach across cultures and media...