Melville

This year's diverse array of Melville scholarship dictates increased selectivity and careful categorization. Even after omitting some general studies with a section on Melville, there remain five books, two themed essay collections, two new editions, and the usual plethora of worthy articles. The well-attended 2005 conference in New Bedford on Melville and Frederick Douglass generated an enormous number of comparative studies, the best of them published either in a collection of essays edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter or in a special issue of Leviathan (10, ii). Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person's edited volume revisits the friendship of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Melville, with a twinned emphasis on biography and literature. Complementing the predominantly historical methodologies in these collections are a book and numerous articles that take poststructuralist gambits to address Melville's language, philosophy, and politics, a book on Melville's compositional practices in Typee, and another book on Melville's reading in poetry and poetics. Both "Bartleby" and Battle-Pieces receive especially insightful treatment as, once again, Melville's life and works inspire mutually enriching dialogues among scholars across the critical spectrum.

i Biographies, Editions, and Reference Works

The introduction and over half of the essays in Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person (Georgia), stress biography. The editors set the tone in "Hawthorne and Melville: Writing, Relationship, and Missing Letters" (pp. 1–24) by surveying biographers' willingness to confront homoeroticism, from the "innocent" Randall Stewart to the closeted gay scholar Newton Arvin. Two recent biographers of each writer, Laurie Robertson-Lorant in "Mr. Omoo and the Hawthornes: The Biographical Background" (pp. 27–49) and Brenda Wineapple in "Hawthorne and Melville; or, the Ambiguities" (pp. 51–69; see AmLS 2000, p. 50), rehearse the familiar facts of the relationship in essays that discount the homoerotic. Reviving a dialogue with Wineapple begun in a special issue of ESQ in 2000, Robert Milder reprises "'The Ugly Socrates': Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience" (pp. 71–111; see AmLS 2000, pp. 58–59), emphasizing Pierre and Clarel to construct a nuanced spectrum of erotic possibilities in Melville's psychological makeup, from the homosocial and homosexual to the "homotextual." Gale Temple, "'Ineffable Socialities': Melville, Hawthorne, and Masculine Ambivalence in the Antebellum Marketplace" (pp. 113–31), makes a flashy Marxist argument that identifies Hawthorne with Dimmesdale and Coverdale, characters who reject male friendship, and Melville with Ishmael and Pierre, one a character who welcomes male bonding and the other who mourns his masculine isolation. On this basis Temple reckons that Hawthorne accepted with "bourgeois complacency" the writer's individualistic role in the new capitalistic literary marketplace while Melville resisted it. My essay, "Italy, the Civil War, and the Politics of Friendship" (pp. 133–54), argues against an abrupt ending to the friendship in 1852 or 1853 by citing politics rather than Hawthorne's "homosexual panic" as the wedge that drove the two men apart. Melville's enthusiasm for the Risorgimento and the Union contrasts sharply with Hawthorne's disregard for Italian nationalism and his secessionist ideology, and their differing success with consular appointments, which Hawthorne himself noted, made visible their political separation. "Letters on Foolscap" (pp. 156–70), Wyn Kelley's imaginative reconstruction of the missing correspondence on the "Agatha" story that Melville offered to Hawthorne as a plot for a novel, prefaces her essay "Hawthorne and Melville in the Shoals: 'Agatha,' the Trials of Authorship, and the Dream of Collaboration" (pp. 173–95), which reads the correspondence as a political metaphor of union and disunion and a bridge to Melville's later writings. Kelley supports her view by citing Hawthorne's biography of Franklin Pierce, the two authors' differing views on slavery, Melville's flirtation with Whig politicos, Hawthorne's vacation on the Isle of Shoals, and Melville's interest in Beaumont and Fletcher, successful collaborators whom he had hoped to emulate in a new American Renaissance. Christopher Castiglia's contribution, "Alienated Affections: Hawthorne and Melville's Trans-intimate Relationship" (pp. 321–44), explores "the language of friendship" that "bonded the nation's contradictory impulses toward autonomy and...