Melville

In advance of the 2019 bicentennial of Herman Melville's birth, this year's abundance of new scholarship covers all aspects of his life and corpus and brings new methodologies to bear on such long-vibrant areas of study as aesthetics, philosophy, politics, and geography. Significant major works include three monographs and an essay collection. Notable currents include the introduction of a variety of new digital methods and archives, an emphatic return to questions of form and aesthetics, and a surge of excellent new work on Melville and philosophy. A special issue of Leviathan devoted to Israel Potter brings welcome attention to an under-studied novel, while the essay collection Herman Melville in Context and a scholarly edition of The Piazza Tales offer effective new teaching tools.

i Biographies, Editions, and Reference Works

Christopher Ohge and Steven Olsen-Smith edit "Melville's Hand: Digital Analysis of Melville's Marginalia," a special section in Leviathan (20, ii). In "Computation and Digital Text Analysis at Melville's Marginalia Online" (pp. 1–16), their introduction to three essays making use of that online resource, Ohge and Olsen-Smith discuss the value of new methodologies of digital text analysis. Given the volume of Melville's annotations, they note, "Only a machine can quickly compute word counts of selected content Melville marked in the plays of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works, or in each book of The Odyssey, or in Paradise Lost. Only a machine can stack a series of graphs showing lexical variety in Melville's markings or instantaneously classify by positive and negative sentiments enormous amounts of words that appear most frequently in passages he marked in multiple texts." In "Melville's Hand in Chapman's Homer" (pp. 17–36) Tony McGowan et al. employ corpus analysis of high-frequency words to establish "the composite sourcing Melville had to absorb" before writing even a single line of "The Maldive Shark." In "At the Axis of Reality: Melville's Marginalia in The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare" (pp. 37–67) Ohge, Olsen-Smith, and five other contributors locate patterns in the vast number of passages Melville marked in William Shakespeare's Dramatic Works and assess these against claims Melville made about Shakespeare in "Hawthorne and his Mosses" and elsewhere, noting that the words man, love, and world appear with the greatest frequency. Most compellingly, in "'If Not Equal All, Yet Free': Political Freedom and Theological Doubt in Melville's Reading of Milton" (pp. 68–89) Peter Norberg demonstrates how a survey of the number and kind of passages marked by Melville in his copies of John Milton can fundamentally alter the ways scholars have interpreted the influence of Paradise Lost. Focusing on the frequency with which Melville marked the word free, Norberg argues that these markings suggest that the political senses of freedom drew Melville's attention at least as often as the text's theological debates around "free will." Dozens of graphs across these essays analyze everything from total word counts marked by Melville in these books to the lexical uniqueness and variety of the passages he marked to the frequency of particular words and their negative and positive valuations. This combination of distant reading with close demonstrates that large-scale quantitative analysis can both yield new insights about Melville's reading and support qualitative analysis of specific passages and annotations.

Two essays provide details on Melville's assets. Warren F. Broderick's "Melville Family Properties as Revealed in Taxation and Assessment Records" (Leviathan 20, iii: 66–78) offers newly gathered information on family-owned properties in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Gansevoort, New York, and leases on properties in Albany, Lansingburgh, and New York City. In "Melville's Nine Prints in the Osborne Collection in Texas" (Leviathan 20, iii: 79–105) Robert Wallace expands the archive of known Melville artworks. He identifies several prints from Melville's personal collection of more than 400 prints that had not been previously cataloged or exhibited and that have now been fully restored—and reproduced in the essay—including prints after major paintings by Claude Lorrain and J. M. W. Turner.

The most provocative addition to Melville biography this year...