Melville

This year yields three substantial edited collections on Herman Melville's explorations of philosophy and religion; an abundance of riches on his later writings (especially Clarel and Billy Budd); a good deal about Melville's life, reading, and manuscripts; and, as usual, a small mountain of scholarship on Moby-Dick.

i Biographies, Editions, and Reference Works

The most monumental work of Melville scholarship released this year is Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings, ed. Harrison Hayford (Northwestern). It is the final installment of the 15-volume Writings of Herman Melville series begun in 1965, and a 1,000-page testament to the editorial collaborations among Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, Robert A. Sandberg, G. Thomas Tanselle, and a host of other scholars, graduate students, and research assistants. What began the 20th century as a bread box full of manuscripts bound by Lizzie Melville in pink tape is now an exhaustively transcribed, edited, and arranged grouping of Herman's incomplete and unpublished writings. These include the novella Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative); the poetic collections Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope (the latter a grouping that consists primarily of "At the Hostelry" and "An Afternoon in Naples in the Time of Bomba"); the uncollected prose pieces "Rammon," "Story of Daniel Orme," and "Under the Rose"; prose fragments; and about three dozen uncollected poems. Other than Billy Budd, until now none of these uncompleted works has been widely available to scholars—who, beyond the authoritative dissertations of Sandberg (1989) and Robert C. Ryan (1967), have had to make do for years with incomplete print assortments. The latest Northwestern-Newberry volume now provides all known uncompleted Melville manuscripts in one place, along with reading texts and literal transcriptions, an extensive historical note, editorial discussions, publication histories, textual emendations, and more. The usual peccadilloes associated with authoritative editions apply; I imagine interested readers will find plenty to nitpick among the volume's manuscript datings, groupings, and textual emendations, not to mention the historical note's occasional lapses into professional grudges and personal animus. That said, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings is a towering editorial achievement and a likely dynamo for generations of Melville scholarship to come.

Also praiseworthy is this year's effort from editors Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Norton), the latest Melville fiction to get its own Norton Critical Edition. It is hard to think of any 19th-century novel in greater need of such treatment, what with its highly allusive language, tonal instability, and legendarily poor reception. Levine and Weinstein are well aware that readers new to Pierre will need all the help they can get, and help is what they provide, in spades. Besides extensive textual annotations to help the reader "get a grip on just how bizarre, fascinating, and capacious Pierre's language is," the editors include a smorgasbord of culturally contextual documents, letters to and from Melville, and a handful of the novel's hairraisingly negative reviews. (One would wish to see the novel's very few positive contemporary reviews represented too—A. Oakley Hall's, for example—but this is the smallest of quibbles.) All this, plus a healthy selection of classic and contemporary Pierre criticism, makes this Norton Critical Edition likely to realize its stated editorial goal, which is "to leave even more readers 'wonder-smitten' with a work that is only beginning to receive its full due."

In the realm of biography, the Critical Lives series (on modern figures from Karl Marx to Coco Chanel) has dedicated a volume to Melville this year. Expertly and fluidly written by Kevin J. Hayes, Critical Lives: Herman Melville (Reaktion) succinctly encapsulates the life, works, and personality of a relatively elusive figure. Considering the space allotted to him, Hayes superbly dovetails Melville's major life events with his fiction and poetry, enriching the biographical narrative with historical contexts, cultural connections, illustrations, critical quotations, and previously unknown materials. On the latter point, Hayes unveils a number of freshly rediscovered biographical anecdotes and book reviews, which (among other things) go some way toward dispelling the idea that Melville's latter fictions received near...