Melville, Three Ways

Abstract

The books discussed in this review take very different critical approaches to Herman Melville's fiction. The essay collection Whole Oceans Away, edited by Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten, presents a variety of contextual or historicist approaches to understanding Melville's time in? and use of?the Pacific in his writing. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker expand upon their earlier biographically-inflected textual investigations into the version of Pierre that they claim Melville originally intended to write, before his personal and professional disappointments compelled him to insert distracting passages on Pierre's history of authorship. Branka Arsic offers a sustained meditation on passivity and Melville's Bartleby, engaging with a range of theoretical works. Each succeeds in its own terms; yet each could benefit from some consideration of the perspectives offered by the other modes of analysis. Reading these three books together suggests that the challenge is to produce scholarship that is responsive to Melville's own sustained theoretical meditations on the categorizations and taxonomies that structure such thinking.