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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Robert S. Levine
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Summary

But I dont know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf - at any rate it is safer from criticism.

Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, letter of 16 August 1850

This collection is both a handbook to Melville and a provocation. As expected of a Cambridge Companion, it provides readers with comprehensive analyses of the major writings and motifs of a canonized master of world literature. At the same time, this volume has been conceived in a Melvillean spirit of suspicion and revision. Accordingly, it is animated by a dialectical interplay between traditional and newer approaches to Melville. This is a particularly opportune time for such a volume. Over the past two decades or so, the “American Renaissance” has been dramatically reconceived by feminist, African-American, new historical, and other critical approaches. Such key works as Michael Rogin's Subversive Genealogy (1983), Waichee Dimock's Empire for Liberty (1989), and Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations (1993) are but three of the many books that have offered new ways of thinking about the ideological and political implications of Melville's art. There have also been major developments in more traditional, archivally based Melville scholarship. Recent discoveries of Melville family papers (now at the New York Public Library), the publication of such important works as John Bryant's Melville and Repose (1993), Stanton Garner's The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), several volumes in the nearly completed Northwestern-Newberry edition of Herman Melville, and biographies by Laurie Robertson-Laurant (1996) and Hershel Parker (1996) have helped us to make better sense of Melville's compositional practices, aesthetics, sources, biography, and relation to contemporaneous literary debates.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521554772.001
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  • Introduction
  • Edited by Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521554772.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521554772.001
Available formats
×