This book gathers together original essays dealing with Herman Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic cosmopolitanism, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography, an introduction, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-centu ... More
Keywords: Herman Melville, biography, nineteenth century, American literature, class, ethnic cosmopolitanism, religion, marketplace
Print publication date: 2005 | Print ISBN-13: 9780195142822 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 | DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142822.001.0001 |