Project MUSE®: Leviathan - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Leviathan.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1999) through current issueLatest Articles: LeviathanTWOProject MUSE®Leviathan1750-18491525-6995Latest articles in Leviathan. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Mast-Head
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985906
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Our first issue of 2026 brings several changes to Leviathan's masthead. With our March issue, volume 28, number 1, I am honored and humbled to be stepping into the position of Editor after six years as Associate Editor working with Brian Yothers, who now joins Founding Editor John Bryant and former Editor Samuel Otter on the journal's Advisory Board. As Editor since 2020, Brian has led the journal with rigor, care, precision, and a generous and capacious vision of the field, and his skill and erudition is everywhere evident in the past eighteen issues. Particularly emblematic of Brian's broad thinking about the field of Melville studies is Leviathan volume 25, the three issues that commemorated the journal's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallFrom the Mast-Head2026-03-26text/htmlen-USFrom the Mast-Head2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®69572026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Announcement: Melville's Marginalia Online
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985907
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After twenty-five years of maintaining the record of books Herman Melville is known to have owned, borrowed, and consulted (continuing the scholarship of Merton M. Sealts, Jr.) and two decades of collaboration on Melville's Marginalia Online (resuming and augmenting the work of Wilson Walker Cowen), we are pleased to announce the transfer of MMO's editorial leadership to Christopher Ohge and Brandon Hurst. Ohge is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and is an expert in textual scholarship, book history, and nineteenth-century literature. He is Associate Director of the Melville Electronic Library and was previously an editor at the Mark Twain Papers. Hurst is a Ph.D. candidate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallAnnouncement: Melville's Marginalia Online2026-03-26text/htmlen-USAnnouncement: Melville's Marginalia Online2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®45652026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Encyclopedic Raciality: Geo-Ethnographic Speculation in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985909
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Melville's Ishmael is a paradigmatic chronicler of knowledge. Combing the pages of Moby-Dick is less like an archaeological search for surface and depth and more like groping for a critical vocabulary capable of accounting for the seemingly endless moments in which race is embedded in Melville's epistemologies. Purely quantitatively, racialization supplies the enabling vocabulary for the novel's composition: a rough count gives us a hundred and ninety passages (and, in some cases, entire chapters) that rely on complexion, tribe, slavery, or ethnography to do their world-building work. A character is quite literally never introduced without some reference to their country of origin, their complexion, or their tribal
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallEncyclopedic Raciality: Geo-Ethnographic Speculation in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick2026-03-26text/htmlen-USEncyclopedic Raciality: Geo-Ethnographic Speculation in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®721322026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26The Third Man: A Shadow Figure in the Origins Story of the Melville Revival Revealed
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985910
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Most discussions about the start of the movement to revive interest in Herman Melville's life and work spoke until recently of Raymond Weaver and Melville's 1919 birthday centennial or, less often, of Weaver and 1921. The latter is the year the first biography of Melville appeared, a book Weaver wrote, as he did its 1919 germ, an article which a contemporaneous critique called "[p]erhaps the most authentic estimate of the strange genius of Herman Melville" ("Another …" 185).1 But in my study of Weaver's Melville pursuit, which was published in Leviathan 23.1 (March 2021), I found that Carl Van Doren, renowned in the first half of the twentieth century for myriad contributions to American literature, played a more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallThe Third Man: A Shadow Figure in the Origins Story of the Melville Revival Revealed2026-03-26text/htmlen-USThe Third Man: A Shadow Figure in the Origins Story of the Melville Revival Revealed2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®422972026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels by Steve Mentz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985911
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STEVE MENTZSailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic TravelsNew York: Fordham University Press, 2024.Steve Mentz's Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels (2024) is a new collection of critically informed poems about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Consisting of one hundred and thirty-eight short lyrics, one for each chapter of Moby-Dick, it joins the ranks of other book-length poetic adaptations of Melville's novel, a proliferating sub-sub-library that I had the chance to sound while co-editing After Moby-Dick: An Anthology of New Poetry (Spinner Publications, 2019) with Elizabeth Schultz. After Moby-Dick includes poems originally published in Moby-Dick-themed collections such as Spell by Dan Beachy-Quick (2004), Hunt by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallSailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels by Steve Mentz (review)2026-03-26text/htmlen-USSailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels by Steve Mentz (review)2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®207372026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26All Astir
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985912
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Participants asleep under the sperm whale skeleton at New Bedford Whaling Museum during the thirtieth annual Moby-Dick Marathon. January 4, 2026. Photo courtesy Timothy Marr.The year 2026 began with a resounding testament to Moby-Dick's enduring power and significance. Over 3,100 people attended New Bedford Whaling Museum's thirtieth Moby-Dick Marathon. Last year, 2025, had set a record with over 2,400 attendees, a record that was broken this year by a further 700 people. In addition, there were over 5,000 views via livestream. During earlier marathons, readers had read for ten minutes each, but that was
3:30 am, Sunday, January 4, 2026. The reading continues. New Bedford Whaling Museum thirtieth annualMoby-Dick
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallAll Astir2026-03-26text/htmlen-USAll Astir2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®283742026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985913
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Melvilleans from around the globe gathered in Avery Point, Connecticut, from June 16–19, 2025, and the coastal location of the conference provided a perfect venue for considering the theme of Melville's oceanic imagination. The conference was hosted by the University of Connecticut, Avery Point, with the distinguished scholar of maritime studies and sailor Mary K. Bercaw Edwards of UConn piloting the journey along with her co-organizers Wyn Kelley (MIT) and Tony McGowan (U.S. Military Academy, West Point). This special issue of Extracts aims to capture something of the energy and diversity of this conference, which in addition to the geographic range captured in its title also ranged widely across the humanities
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-03-26text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®87952026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Other Seas: Sailing without Ahab
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985914
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The idea of sailing on the Pequod without Captain Ahab at the helm will seem absurd to most readers of Leviathan. In making a case for an un-directed voyage, my position on the margins of Melville scholarship may be paradoxically helpful. My academic work and education emerge from Shakespeare studies, ecocriticism, and the Blue Humanities. I have considerable impostor syndrome appearing in this journal among the "real Melvilleans." When it comes to Melville, I am superfan more than a scholar. I write in these pages as interloping poet more than responsible critic. And, maybe worst of all, this chapter will splice together my idiosyncratic reimaging of the voyage of the Pequod with some of my own swim poems about my
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallOther Seas: Sailing without Ahab2026-03-26text/htmlen-USOther Seas: Sailing without Ahab2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®550082026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Melville's Ghosts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985915
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I have never had a unified theme of Herman Melville's political theory. But my most recent work on him seems to be gesturing to a throughline across his oceanic texts, namely that of haunting. Specters, doppelgängers, zombies seem to be everywhere and, for me at least, reading Melville's work in a distinctly gothic vein has led me to some new ways of seeing the political landscape—or seascape if you will—of the nineteenth century. In some of my recently published pieces—"Melville's Spectral Mutinies" in A New Companion to Herman Melville and "The Ghost of Anacharsis Cloots in last Fall's issue of Leviathan—as well as a work in progress about Pip from Moby-Dick—I have been playing with the idea that in returning to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallMelville's Ghosts2026-03-26text/htmlen-USMelville's Ghosts2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®446482026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Among Shipmates: In the Wake of Oceanic Melville
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985916
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Colin Dewey. Photo courtesy of Colin Dewey.The Fourteenth International Melville Conference was, for me, a kind of homecoming. I have no doubt that many of us shared a similar sense, not only because of the warm reception by our hosts at University of Connecticut Avery Point, at Mystic Seaport Museum, and especially the conference organizers, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Wyn Kelley, and Tony McGowan, but also due to the easy intimacy among participants, many of whom attend the International Melville Conferences regularly, and have for decades. Rare indeed is the academic gathering that boasts such a committed corps of participants that is also as open and deliberately welcoming to newcomers as this.Many of my friends
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallAmong Shipmates: In the Wake of Oceanic Melville2026-03-26text/htmlen-USAmong Shipmates: In the Wake of Oceanic Melville2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®139282026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Pip's Connecticut
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985917
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[I]n his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine.Rosa Angélica Martínez. Photo courtesy of Rosa Angélica Martínez.Not far from Pip's "native Tolland County in Connecticut" – the young African American cabin-boy aboard the Pequod in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)—Melvillean enthusiasts gathered at University of Connecticut Avery Point in Groton for the Fourteenth International Melville Conference, from June 16–19, 2025 (NN Moby-Dick 412). My return to Connecticut included recalling Pip's Connecticut. Melville drenches that line in nineteenth-century
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallPip's Connecticut2026-03-26text/htmlen-USPip's Connecticut2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®290182026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Melville Studies across the Oceans
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985918
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Yoshiaki Furui. Photo courtesy of Tomoyuki Zettsu.There is a truly valid reason why the International Melville Society Conference bears the adjective "International." This was my fourth time attending the conference—Tokyo (2015), New York (2019), Paris (2022), and the University of Connecticut, Avery Point (2025). Every time I attend the conference, I am struck by the diversity of the participants who come from around the globe—not only from all parts of the United States but also from Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world. And there is no overstating the prominent number of Japanese scholars at each conference: this time there were as many as fifteen Japanese presenters, comprising more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallMelville Studies across the Oceans2026-03-26text/htmlen-USMelville Studies across the Oceans2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®127062026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26"Ocean Reveries": "Oceanic Melville" and Intellectual Community
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985919
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Brandon Hurst. Photo courtesy of Brandon HurstI would like to begin my reflections on the Fourteenth International Melville Society Conference, "Oceanic Melville," held at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point, as all reflections should begin: at its conclusion. Lenora Warren's brilliant closing plenary address, "Melville's Ghosts," and the subsequent illuminating discussions during the Q&A session explored how Melville's fiction reveals moments of revolution and resistance, addresses violence, labor, and injustice—both visible and obscure—and offers insight into our current social, cultural, and political landscape, past and present. These powerful reflections punctuated a week that was intellectually
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmall"Ocean Reveries": "Oceanic Melville" and Intellectual Community2026-03-26text/htmlen-US"Ocean Reveries": "Oceanic Melville" and Intellectual Community2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®173462026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26The Misty Insularity of Mystic
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985920
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Caroline Hildebrandt. Photo courtesy of Caroline Hildebrandt.I had flown in from sultry France, and arrived by the end of a Sunday afternoon, the day before the conference started. After leaving my things at the hotel, my feet infallibly led me to water. I could see the 1882 Training Ship Joseph Conrad from afar, guessing her shape behind the silhouettes of the graves of the nearby Mystic graveyard. I came to a sea shack, fishiest of all fishy places, that cunningly served chowder, but also burger and fries for less adventurous stomachs. A timely place to see again some friendly Melvillean faces that had also gained their share of spectral quality from the precincts or, perhaps, jet lag might have played a role
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallThe Misty Insularity of Mystic2026-03-26text/htmlen-USThe Misty Insularity of Mystic2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®91432026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Photo Gallery
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985921
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1. Conference co-chair Mary K. Bercaw Edwards opens the tour of the 1841 whale-ship Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport Museum on June 18, 2025. Photo courtesy Alan Van Brackel.2. Conference co-chairs Wyn Kelley and Tony McGowan open the 14th International Melville Society Conference, Oceanic Melville, on June 16, 2025. Photo courtesy Brian Yothers.3. Group photo of Japanese scholars at the Oceanic Melville conference. In the front row (from left to right): Ikuno Saiki, Mari Kotani, Katsuya Izumi, Shoko Tsuji. In the back row (from left to right): Yukiko Oshima, Yuto Shinozaki, Mikayo Sakuma, Takayuki Tatsumi, Yoshiaki Furui, Masato Itagaki, Michiko Shimokobe, Tomoyuki Zettsu. June 18, 2025. Photo courtesy of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallPhoto Gallery2026-03-26text/htmlen-USPhoto Gallery2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®64372026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26A Third Update on Books Owned, Borrowed, and Consulted by Herman Melville
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985922
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Since the publication of Leviathan 23.2 (June 2021), in which Steven Olsen-Smith and Peter Norberg reported on newly documented information on books owned by Melville, Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) can announce the discovery of major new reading evidence in Melville's 10-volume set of James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson and revisions of attribution in his copy of the 2-volume Riches of Chaucer.1 Melville's reading of Johnson and Chaucer shed light on his development as a writer and thinker at a crucial period in his early writing career following the 1849 publication of Mardi, with lasting influence well into his later career. This evidence also underscores the importance of Melville's reading of critics
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/601/image/coversmallA Third Update on Books Owned, Borrowed, and Consulted by Herman Melville2026-03-26text/htmlen-USA Third Update on Books Owned, Borrowed, and Consulted by Herman Melville2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1028142026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26