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248Reviews fittingly accommodates the ambiguities that Melville clearly hoped to create —and that radio dramatists worked against a century later. Oklahoma State UniversityTim Prchal Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006. 310 pp. Cloth: $55.00. Pardes, liana. Melville'sBibles. Berkeley: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 2008. 206 pp. Cloth: $60.00; paper: $24.95. The aesthetic turn in Melville studies has arrived. While interest in Melville and the visual arts has been strong over the past twenty years, thanks in large part to the work of scholars such as Robert K. Wallace and Douglas J. Robillard, the question ofwhat it means for Melville's texts themselves to be aesthetic—to be works of art as well as commentaries on art— has at times given pride ofplace to cogent historicist and postcolonial studies of those texts, exemplified by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn. In recent years, however, as interest in Melville's poetry has grown and as the New Formalism has led scholars to reassess the value (yes, value) of form in literary criticism, Edgar Dryden's compelling Monumental Melville has used Melville-as-poet to refashion the author as a visionary proponent ofclose reading. In the case ofMoby-Dick, Eyal Peretz's Literature , Disaster, and the Enigma ofPowerbrings together poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and most originally trauma theory to respond, as she says, both to Melville's novel and to the crisis in our understanding of literature at the turn of the millennium. All these various strands intersect richly with Robert Milder's ExiledRoyalties and liana Pardes's Melville's Bibles, two very different studies that nonetheless share an unabashed and delightfully conveyed pleasure in the Melvillean text—not just as a driving force to move the reading along but as a critical principle that re-infuses classic texts with at times surprisingly new and provocative readings. Milder's work is somewhere between a unified monograph and a collection of related essays, each of which work on their own terms but collectively help to construct a critical biography of Melville. Or, perhaps more accurately, a biographical criticism, if such a phrase can express the dynamic relationship between author, text, and reader that Milder evokes to reframe Melville's works as a lifelong project in creating their author's life, much as Milder argues Byron does in works like Cain and Childe Harold'sPilgrimage. ExiledRoyaltiesis itselfthe result ofsome thirty years ofwriting and rewriting insights into Melville's entire corpus, from Typee to BillyBudd, and the book bears its own witness to the critical histories in which it has been formed. The opening chapter on Typee engages with Studies in American Fiction249 postcolonial studies by reconsidering Freud's understanding of eros as a nineteenth-century baseline for Melville's meditations on sexuality and empire in the South Seas, seeing the two as entirely intertwined and looking for innocent eros as an escape from the "snivelization" ofthe West that Melville criticized throughout his life. At the other end of the spectrum, the three chapters revolving around Moby-Dick are aesthetic, or at least New Critical, in at times extreme ways; Milder continually cites by name a pantheon of mid-century critics—Matthiessen, Sealts, Zoellner, Vincent, Berthoff, above all Bezanson—as if to position his theory of "democratic tragedy" as a kind of retrospective thought-piece, rather than the literary response to political readings along the lines of Michael Rogin and Joyce Appleby that it might in fact be. Milder is at his best when he uses psychoanalytic treatises lightly to suggest, rather than articulate, the complex dynamics involved in Melville's thinking about his relationship to Hawthorne, for instance (whatever attraction exists is really about Melville finding his own self, not finding a soulmate). However, the chapter focused on their friendship, "The Ugly Socrates," is the most uneven in the entire book. While Milder begins the chapter by stressing, in the context of Melville's alleged homosexual attraction to Hawthorne, that sexual and psychological categories should not be anachronistically mapped onto nineteenth-century relationships, he draws heavily from late-twentieth-century psychoanalysis (not psychoanalytical criticism) to, in fact, map the dynamics of Pierre. The only figure in...

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