Brian Yothers Research Articles

From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head Brian Yothers We begin a new year and a new three-year cycle of Leviathan issues this spring. This new cycle for Leviathan corresponds with new terms for the leadership of The Melville Society as a whole, and I want to pause for a moment in this column to thank our Society leadership from the least three years, as this last three-year cycle has posed challenges of the sort that scholarly societies and journals do not routinely encounter, not least because of the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has set the terms for our work in many ways since March of 2020. We have a great deal to celebrate as we begin our new cycle, from a highly successful conference in Paris that constitutes much of the subject matter for this issue to the fact that we are now celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary as a journal, as indicated by the twenty-fifth anniversary logo on our cover designed by Karen Coughlin in consultation with Mary Alice Fallon Yeskey. The Melville Society has benefited immensely from the commitment of its officers and committee members, not only to keeping the Society going, but also to ensuring that the growth and development of the Society and journal continue. I want to begin by thanking our officers and committee members from the last three years. Our three presidents, Samuel Otter, Timothy Marr, and Rodrigo Lazo, have all helped to ensure the strength of the organization during the pandemic and have gone beyond the traditionally ceremonial role of president in their contributions to the flourishing of The Melville Society. Our Executive Secretary of the last three years, Matthew Rebhorn, faced the challenging situation of stepping into his role at the beginning of the pandemic and offering leadership to a Society that was only able to resume meeting in person in the middle of 2022. Our Associate Secretary for Programs and Conferences, Meredith Farmer, had instituted a travel grant program in 2019 that she not only maintained, but expanded during the pandemic years, greatly aiding scholars seeking to travel to our 2022 conference in Paris. Many senior members of the Society contributed generously to the travel grant program, enabling the conference to be as broadly inclusive as possible. Zachary Hutchins, our Treasurer for the last three years, also stepped into an unexpectedly challenging situation and responded with grace and determination in addressing the Society’s finances. Robert K. Wallace and Christopher Sten maintained a flourishing Melville Society Cultural Project throughout the pandemic years, laying [End Page 1] a foundation for continued contributions by the MSCP. Kelly Ross, our at-large member in the Executive Committee was consistently a sharp and thoughtful contributor to our discussions, as Jennifer Greiman, her predecessor in that role, moved on to doing superb work as Leviathan’s new Associate Editor. Our officers from 2020–2022 accomplished a great deal under inclement circumstances, as we redefined our relationship to Johns Hopkins University Press as a Member Society, reworked the Society’s dues structure, and commissioned the redesign of the Society website, all in the service of the continued flourishing of The Melville Society at a time when the humanities as a whole have often seemed under attack. We are excited to welcome our new Executive Committee members: John Wenke as President, Dawn Coleman as Executive Secretary, Steven Olsen-Smith as Treasurer (Society members may recall that Steve has served in this role before, and we are grateful for his return to the role), and Emilio Irigoyen as member-at-large. Robert K. Wallace, Meredith Farmer, Jennifer Greiman, and I will continue in our roles from the last three years, and we offer special thanks to Matthew Rebhorn, Zachary Hutchins, Christopher Sten, and Kelly Ross for their service to the Society over the last term. Our committees have also done important work over the last three years. Of particular note is the work that Carie Schneider has done as the chair of our Communications Committee and our new Web Editor in overseeing the updating and revamping of our website, and we are very grateful to Adam Fales, Chip Badley, and Kassie Jo Badon for their...

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers Maki Sadahiro Following John Bryant’s reading of passages from his Melville biography and the lively responses and interactions of the Melvilleans in attendance, the exhibition hall had mostly emptied out. Bryant’s voice, passionately recreating and reliving Melville’s life, had seemed to fill the space, and Melville’s energy was in the air, magnified by the artworks inspired by Click for larger view View full resolution Maki Sadahiro. Photo courtesy of Maki Sadahiro. [End Page 95] and responding to his literary works. Enshrined at the center of the exhibition room was Jos Sances’s 14-foot x 51-foot scratchboard drawing mural Or, The Whale, inspired by Moby-Dick and C. L. R. James’s interpretation of the novel. Peter Martin’s Call Me Ahab series of black-and-white photographs taken with an iPhone camera portrayed Captain Ahab as a sexy, nude young man with a harpoon, casting his melancholy eye on the viewer. Ishmael was also there with his face hidden behind a whale’s skull mask. Embracing him was Queequeg (Peter Martin & David Rosenthal, Altered Visions). On the other side of the room, Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss’s ReWritten, in which Melville’s writing of Mobyo-Dick is contextualized in the author’s affectionate interactions with Hawthorne, was being broadcast. I attended the exhibition with a fellow Melvillean from Korea, Misook Lee, and could not help feeling haunted by the artistic renderings of Melville’s spirit featured at the event. I watched and recorded Lee’s dance performances, which both responded to and interacted with the artworks at the exhibition. At first I was mostly an observer, standing still to capture the performance in the frame of my iPhone screen, but as I followed Lee moving in front of the whale mural, from its head to tail, I gradually realized that my own body was beginning to move as well, as if we were dancing collaboratively. It is not an overstatement to say that it was simultaneously a transcorporeal experience and a transtemporal one because our dancing traced Sances’s historical vignettes of US capitalism, which were depicted within the space of the whale’s body. The whale motivated us to recapture history—from the massacre of the Pequot Indians to mining, the Civil Rights Movement, and ecological destruction such as water pollution and climate change—and made us ponder all the associated violence, injury, and suffering. While recording the dance, I immersed myself in “Melville’s Energies,” the aptly evoked title of the Thirteenth International Melville Society Conference in Paris. At this conference in Paris, I felt more Melville energy and saw his works generate more new thought and artworks than at any Melville conference I had participated in since the one held in Jerusalem in 2009. I arrived in Paris ready to read a paper on Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd and Melville’s attitude toward “postcolonial” American literature, which inspired the opera production team. That team included Britten, E. M. Forster, and William Plomer, who together created a “British” opera from within the strong influence of continental music traditions. The transhistorical, transnational, and transcorporeal relationships between scholars and artists at the exhibition impressed me deeply and motivated me to look further into the diverse and multilayered interpretive community of Melville. [End Page 96] Click for larger view View full resolution Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss perform a scene from ReWritten during the “ReWritten: Exploring Melville Through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy” session, June 29, 2022. Photo credit Alan Van Brackel. For me, a decisive culmination point at the conference, in which an organic interpretive community had taken shape, occurred during the session “ReWritten: Exploring Melville through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy,” which explored the aesthetics manifested through bodies in motion. The panel consisted of Brian Yothers, a Melville scholar, Katherine Stubbs, a Hawthorne scholar, and dance professionals Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss, who examined Melville’s engagement with the dancing body and the process of translating literary texts into somatic performances. Yothers traced Melville’s interest in dance throughout his career, from Typee to Moby-Dick...

The Truth behind Chapter 25 in Omoo

The Truth behind Chapter 25 in Omoo Mark Howard Melville's first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), are based on his experiences as a mariner and beachcomber in the Pacific in the 1840s. This paper will focus on the first half of Omoo, which centers on his time serving as a crewman aboard the Australian whaling ship Lucy Ann in 1842. Melville changed the names of the vessel and the chief mate in Omoo. The Lucy Ann became the Julia and the forceful first mate, James German, was renamed John Jermin. While he was aboard the Lucy Ann, Melville heard an anecdote from James German about a shipwreck he had experienced some years earlier. Melville remembered the story and later incorporated parts of it into chapter 25 of Omoo. He embellished what he heard from German with additional material from another contemporary shipwreck account involving the Australian whaler Mary. The details of the latter shipwreck were published in American newspapers at the time Melville was writing Omoo. Just how he blended these two stories into something new is of interest as an example of Melville's creative processes at work. The relevant part of chapter 25 opens with the whaleship Julia approaching Papeete harbour on the island of Tahiti to seek medical help for her ill captain. Heading out of the harbour is a small schooner with a white crewman aboard who turns out to be "an old shipmate of Jermin's, one Viner, long supposed dead, but now resident on the island." The meeting of these men, under the circumstances, is one of a thousand occurrences appearing exaggerated in fiction; but, nevertheless, frequently realised in actual lives of adventure. Some fifteen years previous, they had sailed together as officers of the bark Jane, of London, a South Seaman. Somewhere near the New Hebrides, they struck one night upon an unknown reef; and, in a few short hours, the Jane went to pieces. The boats, however, were saved; some provisions also, a quadrant, and a few other articles. But several of the men were lost before they got clear of the wreck. [End Page 135] Click for larger view View full resolution The title page of the first edition of Omoo (1847). Image courtesy of Brian Yothers. [End Page 136] The three boats, commanded respectively by the captain, Jermin, and the third mate, then set sail for a small English settlement at the Bay of Islands in New Zealand. Of course they kept together as much as possible. After being at sea about a week, a Lascar in the captain's boat went crazy; and, it being dangerous to keep him, they tried to throw him overboard. In the confusion that ensued, the boat capsized from the sail's "jibing;" and a considerable sea running at the time, and the other boats being separated more than usual, only one man was picked up. The very next night it blew a heavy gale; and the remaining boats in taking in all sail, made bundles of their oars, flung them overboard, and rode to them with plenty of line. When morning broke, Jermin and his men were alone upon the ocean; the third mate's boat, in all probability, having gone down. After great hardships, the survivors caught sight of a brig, which took them on board, and eventually landed them in Sydney. Ever since then our mate had sailed from that port, never once hearing of his lost shipmates, whom, by this time, of course, he had long given up. Judge, then, his feelings, when Viner, the lost third mate, the instant he touched the deck, rushed up and wrung him by the hand. During the gale his line had parted; so that the boat, drifting fast to leeward, was out of sight by morning. Reduced, after this, to great extremities, the boat touched, for fruit, at an island of which they knew nothing. The natives, at first, received them kindly; but one of the men getting into a quarrel on account of a woman, and the rest taking his part, they were all massacred but Viner, who, at the time, was in an adjoining village. After staying on...

Brian Yothers, Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass (Rochester: Camden House, 2016), 186 pp.

Brian Yothers, Reading Abolition: The Critical Reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass (Rochester: Camden House, 2016), 186 pp.

From the Mast-Head

From the Mast-Head Brian Yothers This issue of Leviathan marks more than one transition in the life of this journal. The transition that I suspect will be most immediately evident to current subscribers is that we are resuming our normal issue length and scope after a series of four substantially expanded issues for the 2019 bicentennial of Herman Melville’s birth. The other significant transition that we are observing with the June 2020 issue is a change in our editorial staff. With this issue, volume 22, number 2, I am moving into the role of Editor of Leviathan. Samuel Otter, who has served as Editor with extraordinary vision, care, and scrupulous attention to detail for the past six years, has now moved to our Advisory Board, and John Bryant, who guided the journal as Editor from its inception in 1999 through 2013, continues to hold the title of Founding Editor in addition to his role on the Advisory Board. As the third Editor of Leviathan, I feel immense gratitude to John and Sam, as I have learned more than I could have imagined from working closely with Sam over the past six years, and I have been and continue to be proud to be a part of the endeavor that John established more than twenty years ago when he founded Leviathan. I cannot conceive of better mentors or bigger shoes to fill. Our new Associate Editor, who now steps into the role that I held from 2014 to 2019 and that Samuel Otter and Wyn Kelley held before me, is Jennifer Greiman of Wake Forest University. Jennifer is known to readers of this journal as the author of outstanding work on Melville and democracy, and she brings a combination of theoretical and critical acumen and close attention to textual detail that will serve the journal’s continued flourishing and development well. I am delighted to be able to welcome this outstanding Melvillean to our editorial staff as the journal’s fourth Associate Editor. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards of the University of Connecticut continues in the role of Extracts editor, and Dawn Coleman of the University of Tennessee has graciously agreed to continue for one more year in the role of Book Review Editor, after which Paul Hurh of the University of Arizona will be stepping into that role. I am particularly grateful to Mary K. and Dawn as they have put extraordinary work and care into shaping the journal as it now exists; it is a pleasure to continue to work with them on Leviathan this year, and I hope in Mary K.’s case for years to come. [End Page 1] Although Dawn is moving on to other opportunities after 2020, this seems like the right occasion to mention the truly remarkable work that she has done in shaping the role of Book Review Editor. She is the first Book Review Editor in the journal’s history, and her careful planning and sharp editorial eye have meant that we have had a steady stream of consistently incisive and thoughtful reviews over the past six years. She has also developed the Books in Brief feature, which has substantially expanded the array of volumes to which our readers are exposed. Mary K.’s work on Extracts as the journal’s first Extracts editor has served to broaden and enrich that portion of the journal as well, emphasizing the public-facing dimensions of Melville scholarship and also bringing an array of fascinating developments and discoveries into view. The special issues that she has edited on the Melville Society conferences from 2013 to the present have made an especially vibrant contribution to Melvilleans’ sense of the ongoing vitality of both Melville studies and Melville’s place in the literary imagination. We are fortunate to have a rich selection of essays coming up in future issues, with a substantial focus over the next couple of years on the transnational dimensions of Melville studies. This issue features a special collection of essays on “Melville’s England / England’s Melville” edited by Janet Floyd and Edward Sugden. We look forward in future issues to a cluster of essays by scholars working in France on...

Abstracts: MLA 2020—Seattle: Melville, Gesture, Love

AbstractsMLA 2020—Seattle: Melville, Gesture, Love Michael D. Snediker, Chair, James Lilley, Respondent, Jamie Godley, Lindsay Reckson, and Theo Davis Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in the “Melville, Gesture, Love” panel at MLA 2020, from left to right: James Lilley, Lindsay Reckson, Jamie Godley, Theo Davis, Meredith Farmer. Photo courtesy of Brian Yothers. Jamie Godley’s paper, “The Unfinishable Gesture of The Confidence-Man,” considers the gestural openness of that novel’s final sentence, “Something further may follow of this Masquerade,” in terms of a “sustained temporal [End Page 111] incongruity” that equivocally interrupts what it only nominally terminates. His attention to Giorgio Agamben’s remarks on the commedia dell’arte—the extent to which “Harlequin and the Doctor are not characters . . . but rather gestures figured as a type, constellations of gestures”—illuminates gesture’s singular interposition “between the text and our reading.” I admire Godley’s sense of affinity between this dimensionalizing suspension and Jacques Lacan’s understanding of tuché as that which belies the mimetic functions of narrative automaticity. The libidinal movement of this Melvillean “Something” (in relation, for instance, to Pitch’s wondering “where was slipped in the entering wedge”) sharpens our sense of textual and readerly desire alike as (and for) a mode of reality beyond what narratives of “real life itself can show”: the irresolvable “may” at once embedded within and spurring the arc that following furthers. Lindsay Reckson’s account, “Suspended Eros, or the Gesture of Billy Budd,” invites us to imagine the affective contours of a “gestural criticism” modeled on, if not less emulatively coextensive with, the gestural weather of which the efforts and desires of the novella’s individual characters are localized expression. Noting the charismatic economy by which the foundering conduct of Billy’s “fatal gesture” indexes both the comportment and liveliness of our own gestures of critical attention, Reckson understands the medium in which reader and character of Melville’s text are equally immersed as what Agamben denominates the “pure gesturality” of doing “rather than being.” The performative field of “Doing,” not least the unsatisfiable agential strain of the novella’s exercising pulsions, opens for Reckson onto the cross-hatched field of love distillatively voiced in Billy’s plangent disclosure, “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him.” If the tongue’s subjunctively elusive indeterminacy figures a gestural hinge between discipline and desire, our own hesitant gravitation toward its suspensive mechanism holds out, Reckson insightfully suggests, the possibility of “knowledge suspended” for the cradling sake of an intimacy that is salubriously, definitionally incompletable: not only the suspension of deferral, but the suspension of holding, and holding back, of attention prolonged like a chord. In “Melville’s Forms of Vitality,” Theo Davis reads Melville’s “The Piazza” alongside the work of developmental psychologist Daniel Stern. Removed as Davis’s initial recounting of Stern’s characterization of therapeutic encounter would seem from the customarily lavish garrulousness of Melville’s narration, it is from within this discrepancy that Davis articulates a form of intimacy no less germane to the gestural fields traced by Godley and Reckson. Contra the elaborate floridity that occupies first half of “The Piazza,” Stern’s description of intersubjective relation posits a fastidiously spare economy of “movement and expression” in which gesture and speech unfold from each other [End Page 112] as commensurate substance. Davis deftly contemplates an analogous scene embedded within Melville’s pastoral extravagance, not coincidentally marked by that moment at which the narrator “speaks as a character rather than narrating.” In the exchange that follows between the narrator and Marianna, their tentative gestures of conversation speak to an affective relational complexity—a vulnerability if not peril—that affords for Davis a possible remediation between criticism’s own prevailing temperaments, so often rigidly split between the force of ideology critique and the softer (but no less simplified) choreography of appreciation and love. With deepest thanks to Jamie, Lindsay, and Theo and to James Lilley and Meredith Farmer for presiding in my absence with such manifold generosity. ________ The Unfinishable Gesture of The Confidence-Man Jamie Godley Dartmouth College Whereas early critics of The Confidence-Man insisted that the...

Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies. Edited by Harold K. Bush and Brian Yothers. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Pp. 288. $90.00 cloth; $28.95 paper.)

<i>Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies</i>. Edited by Harold K. Bush and Brian Yothers. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Pp. 288. $90.00 cloth; $28.95 paper.)

All Astir

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards The bicentennial of Melville’s birth continues to be a rich, wonderful, and packed year. The Twelfth International Melville Conference, “Melville’s Origins,” will occur June 17–20, 2019, in New York City just as this issue of Leviathan appears. Thank you to Jennifer Baker (New York University) and Tony McGowan (United States Military Academy at West Point), the Co-Chairs of the conference organizing committee, and to the other members of the committee, Dawn Coleman (University of Tennessee) and Martha Elena Rojas (University of Rhode Island), for all their hard work conceiving, organizing, and running the conference. The New York conference includes the inauguration of the Melville Society Travel Grant Fund. Meredith Farmer, who initiated the fund, writes with heartfelt appreciation for all those who were able to donate: “Thanks to you we were able to give eight $300 grants paired with waived conference registration fees—far more than the three we had initially projected. We are thrilled to be able to support so many people’s work, and we would like to congratulate our award winners: José Alfaro, Pilar Martínez Benedí, Jaime Campomar, Adam Fales, Alex Moskowitz, Caitlin Smith Oyekole, Kylan Rice, and Nicholas Spengler.” The 2019 MLA conference, which was held in Chicago in January, included two Melville Society panels, “Melville’s Quarrel with Modernity,” chaired by Kim Evans, and “Reading The Confidence-Man Today,” chaired by Rodrigo Lazo, as well as a joint session, “American Lives: Whitman and Melville,” organized by John Matteson and Edlie Wong. Abstracts from “Melville’s Quarrel with Modernity” and “Reading The Confidence-Man Today” appear in this issue of Extracts. There was also a Melville Society dinner at the Palm Chicago. The year 2019 also saw the inaugural Melville symposium at the University of Kansas: “Melville and Race: A Mini-Symposium on the Bicentennial of Melville’s Birth.” The symposium was endowed by prominent Melville scholar Elizabeth Schultz, most recently author of “The New Art of Moby-Dick,” which appeared in the March issue of Leviathan (21.1). Schultz, Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas where she taught from 1967 to 2001, also endowed the Herman Melville Distinguished Professorship in the Department of English at Kansas. Randall Fuller, the first to hold that title, organized the [End Page 147] symposium: speakers included Wyn Kelley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on “Retouching Whiteness: Racial Ambivalence in Melville’s Late Work”; Ivy G. Wilson (Northwestern University) on “Lost at Sea: The Racial Terror of Domestic Work in Moby-Dick”; and Robert S. Levine (University of Maryland) on “Race, Emigration, and Nation in Redburn.” Kelley spoke about the aesthetics of whiteness in Melville’s “The Berg,” “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” and Billy Budd. She argued that Melville leaves the sublime behind in his later work in favor of disgust and dismay at “bleached” whiteness. Wilson spoke about Fleece and gave a Marxist reading of capitalism and slavery in Moby-Dick, drawing on the work of C. L. R. James. Levine looked beyond the black-white binary in Redburn to examine hierarchies within whiteness, such as Anglo-Saxon vs. Celt. Click for larger view View full resolution MLA panel: “American Lives: Whitman and Melville.” Left to right: John Bryant, John Matteson, Kevin Beliele, Meredith Farmer, and Micah Bateman. Photo courtesy of Brian Yothers. The year 2019 marks the bicentennial for both Melville and Whitman. The Berkshire County Historical Society is working with the Berkshire Athenaeum to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Melville’s birth. The Athenaeum is seeking a “Literary Landmark” designation, which is awarded to libraries associated with writers of note. If awarded, the celebration of the designation will occur on Melville’s birthday, August 1, to be followed by a Moby-Dick marathon reading held at Melville’s former home Arrowhead, also in Pittsfield, Mass. The reading will pause for the annual Monument Mountain [End Page 148] Hike, before finishing. Arrowhead’s Summer 2019 exhibit is “Melville at Home in the Berkshires.” Other institutions are also eager to celebrate Melville’s bicentennial. The Jepson Center in Savannah, Georgia, will mount a major exhibit that will run from October 11, 2019, through February 16, 2020...

Visionary of the World: Melville and Religion ed. by Jonathan A. Cook, Brian Yothers

BOOK REVIEWS 155 work can challenge the premises of individual fields and yield productive insights that provoke desire for further exploration. Megan Lease Boston College Visionary of the World: Melville and Religion Edited by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers Northwestern University Press, 2017. vii + 296 pp. $34.95 paper. Herman Melville and religion is a crowded sub-sub-field. From the early arguments about Melville’s views of the bible and Calvinism following the 1920s Melville revival (William Braswell, Nathalia Wright, Lawrence Thompson, and T. Walter Herbert) to 1960s and 1970s studies of Melville and religions other than Christianity (Dorothee Metlitzki Finkelstein and H. Bruce Franklin), to more recent assessments of Melville as a protocomparative religionist or pluralistic religious traveler (Stan Goldman, William Potter, Jenny Franchot, and Brian Yothers), it would seem that few stones have been left unturned. Given this long and full critical history, I was surprised to find Jonathan Cook and Brian Yothers opening Visionary of the Word with a description of “the pervasive influence of religion” as “an often neglected subject in contemporary critical approaches to the writings of Herman Melville” (3). Cook and Yothers are aware of the long history of scholarship on Melville and religion, and they cite all the authors I have mentioned (and many more) in their fine introduction. They square their claim by suggesting that scholars have not yet pursued Melville’s engagement with his “intensely religious yet transitional era” with sufficient attention to religious beliefs and practices as they were held and lived by Melville’s contemporaries. Melville scholars are known for their intense interest in Melville biographical and textual minutiae (Hershel Parker notes, for instance , “On 2 March 1834, [Melville’s brother] avoided church all day” in his 2000-page biography). Cook and Yothers suggest that Melville scholars have not yet brought a similar level of detail and distinction to the religious and theological developments Melville encountered. Visionary and the Word seeks to bring a greater level of precision to the “religion” half of their Melville and Religion subject. Cook and Yothers divide Visionary and the Word’s nine essays into three sections. The essays of the first section will likely appeal more to Melville Religion & Literature 156 specialists than to those who approach Melville and religion from a more general interest; all three dive deeply into close readings of Melville’s poems . In his contribution, Cook argues that the loss of faith that Melville narrates in his long narrative poem Clarel is “more closely allied to historical developments in mid-Victorian England than to related trends in postbellum America” (23). Cook’s argument for a transatlantic reorientation of Melville’s long poem is, in the main, convincing; however, Melville scholars are more accustomed to historical smoking guns (like a NYPL request slip, a Harper Brothers purchase receipt, or a marginal notation) than the echoes, resonances, and affinities that Cook offers as evidence of British influence on Clarel. In the second chapter, Eileen McGinnis reassesses Melville’s engagement with nineteenth-century scientific challenges to faith, specifically the 1839 publication of Darwin’s Journal and the 1859 publication of Origin of the Species. McGinnis acknowledges that Melville created stock characters in Clarel to juxtapose various faith positions, but she views Melville’s stereotyping as disingenuous (90). Rather than viewing these characters as straw men in contest, McGinnis shows us that Melville creates thorny, unresolvable conversations amongst them to show literature’s potential to “bravely pursue the visible truth” (73). At the end of her essay, McGinnis invites scholars to continue the work of “look[ing] beyond the easy opposition of science and religion that Clarel so disingenuously invokes, to explore instead their convergences and productive tensions…” (90). Another fruitful line of further study will certainly be to engage more particularly with the scientific material that McGinnis shows Melville reading so closely. It remains for someone—hopefully McGinnis in a longer work—to tease out the specific geological and botanical concepts that Melville incorporated into his prose and verse. In the third essay of part one, Martin Kevorkian establishes Dante’s influence on Melville’s understanding of spiritual journey and dives deep into the weeds of Clarel and his obscure...

Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career by Brian Yothers

Reviewed by: Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career by Brian Yothers Christopher N. Phillips BRIAN YOTHERS Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xii + 244 pp. Melville has been a key figure in "the religious turn" for some time, from Timothy Marr's careful analyses of Melville and Islam to investigations of Melville's Protestant interlocutors in studies by Jonathan Cook, Dawn Coleman, and others. Within this heady stream of scholarship characterized by increasingly fine-grained attention to the varieties of religion in Melville's thought and work, Brian Yothers's new book is a welcome addition, one that synthesizes much of the best recent criticism in its early chapters while offering an ambitious panorama of readings across Melville's works from Typee to Billy Budd. Yothers's primary concern is with what he calls "religious difference." Religious belief is never one thing in Melville's world, Yothers argues; it finds its expression in Tommo's exoticizing yet sympathetic gaze at Typee cultic practices, Ishmael's canny use of "infallible Presbyterian" doctrines of love to share in Queequeg's idol worship, Robert E. Lee's parable of a "Moorish maid" to explain the conflicting loyalties of the slaveholding South, and Captain Vere's disconnection of legal authority from religiously informed moral intuition. As Yothers argues, Melville kept in mind, across genres and decades, this question: what difference does religious difference make? Through astute readings of Melville's biography and works, he persuasively explains that Melville's keeping this question open became the author's safeguard against cynical relativism on the one hand and stony orthodoxy on the other. In other words, the puzzle of religious difference kept Melville vital throughout his career. The first chapter establishes the study's central concerns through a remarkable account of Melville's marginalia in a copy of The New Testament and Psalms. Yothers highlights Melville's sensitivity to the Gospels' narrative power, especially in Jesus's parables. The ethic of love in the "Sermon the Mount" in Matthew 5–7 and in I Corinthians 13 also receives some of the most extensive marking in Melville's book. Perhaps most telling in Yothers's reading are [End Page 112] the many cross-references he identifies in margins and on flyleaves throughout the volume, linking Goethe, Carlyle, Shakespeare, and a range of other philosophers and poets, including Asian sources, to the teachings of Christ and his early disciples. Some of Melville's responses may have unsettled his family members. Yothers notes that erasure, even occasional paper-trimming, obscures Melville's comments on some passages, even as select phrases survived this expurgation, as in one written in response to I Corinthians 7.40. Paul explains the ethical principles that should govern a widow's re-marriage, then states, "and I think also that I have the Spirit of God." Melville put an "X" next to this line and in the bottom margin wrote, whether coyly or in earnest, "I too am uncertain." This word is a resonant one for Yothers. The title he gives his book, Sacred Uncertainty, comes from the "Prose Supplement" to Battle-Pieces, where Melville cautions his readers against being too sure of historical and moral dynamics in the aftermath of the Civil War. For Yothers, Melville's uncertainty is sacred, mysterious and inscrutable as well as of infinite worth and meaning. As he shows in the Battle-Pieces chapter, Melville had no qualms about the evils of slavery or the Confederacy's culpability in instigating a war to protect the peculiar institution; his doubts arose, rather, with respect to how to remember and respond to that evil, a delicate question that he believed required humility and gentleness as well as resolve. In chapters on the fiction, Yothers shows that Melville was a long time coming to this reverence for righteous doubt, as he tried on a number of religious and anti-religious stances in his narrators and characters. His early critiques of missionary ventures in the Pacific, for instance, were rooted in a commitment to the ethic of radical love he saw in the Sermon on the Mount, an...

Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion ed. by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers

Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion ed. by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers

All Astir

All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards The Eleventh International Melville Conference, "Melville's Crossings," held at King's College London on June 27–30, 2017, was a resounding success. Janet Floyd, Wyn Kelley, and above all Edward Sugden did a superb job of organizing the conference. In this issue of Leviathan, we are honored to include the plenary addresses of Hester Blum and Anna Brickhouse. We also present President Arimichi Makino's address, five conference reports, and a photo gallery. (More photos are available under the "Photos" tab on the Melville Society website at <http://melvillesociety.org/>.) Click for larger view View full resolution Statue in the entrance hall of King's College London holding the "Melville's Crossings" conference program. Photo courtesy of Colin Dewey. [End Page 69] We wish to thank the plenary speakers for their wonderful talks; President Makino for his address; Søren Frank, Wyn Kelley, Kathryn Mudgett, James Noel, and Caitlin Smith Oyekole for their conference reports; and Hester Blum, Colin Dewey, Maryse Jayasuriya, Shoko Tsuji, and Brian Yothers for their photography. The Melville Society's Hennig Cohen Prize committee is very pleased to announce that this year's Hennig Cohen Prize for the best article, book chapter, or essay on Herman Melville goes to Matthew Knip for "Homosocial Desire and Erotic Communitas in Melville's Imaginary: The Evidence of Van Buskirk" in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62.2 (2016): 355–414. The committee writes in praise of Knip's article: Knip reconsiders Melville's conceptions of desire and community on the basis of a study of the diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, an American sailor whose writings extensively describe the sexual practices of working-class sailors in the 1850s. Through incisive readings of Typee, White-Jacket, Billy Budd, and "John Marr," Knip critiques accounts of Melville that rely on "anachronistically heterosexualized sailors" or present homoerotic desire as either repressed or expressed only privately. Knip argues that Melville's portrayals of homosocial desire "as a binding paradisiacal glue" are rooted not only in his powerful imagination, but also and crucially in his inhabitation of seafaring communities in which social masturbation and sex between men were often accepted as matters of course that did not constitute sexual identity. Knip's essay is an outstanding work of cultural history and a compelling contribution to our understanding of Melville's social thought. In addition, the Hennig Cohen Prize Committee has decided to award an Honorable Mention to Kelly Ross for "Babo's Heterochronic Creativity" in Levia-than 18.1 (March 2016): 5–21. Congratulations to Matthew Knip and Kelly Ross! Shortly after the conference, the first webpage on Herman Melville in Denmark went live: Herman Melville: Værk, liv og forskning (<http://melville.dk/>). Søren Frank, whose conference report is included in this issue, writes: "I am aware that most of you may have some slight difficulties in reading Danish, but I nevertheless thought that you would all appreciate such good news concerning the global promotion of Melville's works. Work on the webpage was initiated by me in 2015 when I taught a class on Melville, and back then all the students in my class contributed one way or the other to the webpage. Since then, three of the students and myself have continued to work on the site." The site was officially launched on August 18, 2017, with a reception at Comparative Literature, Southern Denmark University. Frank adds: "who knows, perhaps at some point some of us and/or others may get to establishing a Danish Melville Society (no promises, though)." [End Page 70] In another instance of Melville's global popularity, Gordon Poole, one of the co-directors of the 2011 Rome conference, gave a talk and reading of Melville's poetry as part of a five-year project entitled "MOBY DICK: avventure, divagazioni e altre strategie sul tema di Melville" ("Moby-Dick: adventures, digressions, and other strategies on the theme of Melville"). Organized by Giovanni Andrea Semerano and Luigi Francini, the event takes place over a five-year period, 2016–2021, in Tuscania, an hour's drive north of Rome, Italy. It includes research, exhibitions, retrospectives...

Introduction

Introduction Robert S. Levine In the December 2017 Los Angeles Review of Books, an online journal with a wide readership, Colin Dayan published a much remarked upon essay (at least among Melvilleans) titled "'Israel Potter'; or, The Excrescence." She laments in the essay what she calls the "academic disregard" of Israel Potter, arguing that Melville's arch and often wildly funny historical novel about the American Revolution is a major achievement meriting at least as much critical attention as Pierre. Through his appropriations and transformations of the 1824 Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter and numerous other source texts, Dayan argues, Melville "recovers all the details that have been silenced in standard histories, while using the frame of conventional history to eat it out from within." It is a novel, she says, that reveals how "the myths of heroism" become entangled "with the wastes of empire." In that regard, it is a novel that helps to illuminate US history in a transnational context from the Revolution to our present moment. For good reason, then, Dayan hopes for "a resurgence of interest" in the novel, and in a piece that for the most part speaks to general readers, she pointedly remarks to those of us who regularly read Leviathan that Israel Potter "now seems a trove of untapped possibilities for interpretation."1 Dayan's essay appeared six months after the convening at King's College, London, of "Melville's Crossings," the Eleventh International Melville Conference. A conference devoted to such issues as Melville and England, the blurring of national boundaries, transatlantic texts and figures, the mutability of identity, and the dynamics of transgression provided the perfect occasion for a reconsideration of Israel Potter. With the help of conference co-organizer Edward Sugden, I set up a writing workshop on Israel Potter, and on June 27th ten of us met for a ninety-minute session to discuss the five-page drafts that each person had written for the workshop. That ninety-minute session became a three-hour meeting, as we wrestled with such issues as Melville's sense of audience, the politics of the novel, Melville's use of his sources, his attitude toward his major characters, his attitude in particular to John Paul Jones (the group was much divided about how to respond to Jones), and many other matters, including how [End Page 1] the major themes of the conference played out in Israel Potter. It was a lively and exhilarating conversation about a novel that some had read for the first time. At the end of the meeting, I proposed to the participants that they work on making their initial five-page drafts into short, punchy essays for a cluster on Israel Potter in Leviathan. My thanks to editors Samuel Otter and Brian Yothers for supporting this initiative, and my thanks to the five participants who decided to take up the challenge of producing the essays that make up this critical cluster. The conversations in London are reflected in these essays, conveying the richness of our exchanges in June 2017 but more importantly the richness of Israel Potter itself. Carol Colatrella provides a helpful initial statement in the overall cluster by situating the novel in relation to US magazine culture of the 1850s as well as to Melville's efforts to reach out to both US and British readers. The novel, Colatrella suggests, has the paradoxical aim of both celebrating and critiquing the Revolutionary War. From the transatlantic perspective of audience, Melville's appeal to very different readerships creates a problem of readerly affiliation and identification with respect to the presentation of the Revolutionary War. But arguably that is the "problem" that energizes the novel's project of de-mythologizing the war and blurring national identities (a theme that is picked up in several of the other essays). Whereas Colatrella works with a broad canvas, Emilio Irigoyen focuses on one key aspect of the novel—exile—and one key scene involving Ben Franklin and his maps. For Irigoyen, the novel is an experiment in form that attempts to convey exile as the experience of "moving stasis." The novel, Irigoyen argues, works with temporal suspensions and spatial detours...

In Melville's Mother Land

In Melville's Mother Land Søren Frank Click for larger view View full resolution Søren Frank. Photo courtesy of Kim Rune. Most interesting spot I have seen in England. Made tour of all colleges. It was here I first confessed with gratitude my mother land, & hailed her with pride. Herman Melville, journal, May 2, 1857 The Eleventh International Melville Conference, "Melville's Crossings," at King's College in London (June 2017) was my second Melville conference, the first being in Tokyo in 2015. This time around I was a little more relaxed. Not only because London was more familiar to me than Tokyo, a city (and country) that I had never been to before the Melville conference, but [End Page 115] also, and mostly, because I knew from Tokyo that Melvilleans were in fact, all things considered, very friendly people. In London, one of the first people I ran into was Alex Calder, whom I had also talked to in Tokyo. His first reaction in London was: "Oh, you were the guy who kept saying in Tokyo that you weren't a Melvillean." Well, I guess he was right. In London, having now earned the right to consider myself a semi-experienced Melville conference participant (and perhaps nearing the title of sub-sub-sub-librarian), I realized how the majority of the many young and middle-aged conference debutants began each conversation with a reservation, expressed with much gravity and sincerity: "I am not a Melvillean!" If Melville as an author is awe-inspiring to us all, this quality may rub off on the scholarly experts who become awe-inspiring whales in the eyes of their colleagues. But again, most of these whales turn out to be human after all, and, as I said, friendly and also genuinely interested in talking to the less familiar faces and newcomers. In London, I had such an experience with one of the distinguished figures in Melville scholarship. In the bus taking us from London to Oxford, with plenty of free seats to choose from, including seats next to old and familiar friends, John Bryant sat himself next to me. Admittedly, at first I felt a bit intimidated, having only spoken very briefly with John in Tokyo and knowing him to be a Leviathan of note in Melville studies, but very quickly we got talking about our respective work on Melville and on different principles and methods of writing biographies. The bus ride to Oxford, which took longer than expected because of traffic, turned out to be a very pleasant and inspiring ride—although it also included a moment of sadness when we passed Grenfell Tower. The afternoon in Oxford was spent listening to Anna Brickhouse's compelling plenary lecture "The Earthquake and the Whale" (reprinted in this issue), which situated Melville's writings in a comparative framework covering the Western Hemisphere and explored them through the lens of "the unsettlement of the Americas" in oceanic, cultural, colonial, racial, and literary dimensions. At the conference dinner, I was fortunate enough to sit opposite Professor Heather O'Donoghue, one of the guests of honor who elegantly instructed us all in Melville's influences from the Old Norse sources during her seven-minute talk, and the composed Edward Sugden, who collaborated with Janet Floyd and Wyn Kelley as the organizer-heroes of the London conference. Next to me on my right was Thomas Zlatic and to my left was Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, whom I had the privilege of visiting in Mystic, Connecticut, the previous fall. The Oxford dinner at Balliol College was a great way of ending the conference in terms of atmosphere, food, and conversation; it was also an appropriate place to end it since Melville probably stopped by there himself in 1857 when he enthusiastically visited Oxford and, according to his journal, "made tour of all the colleges." [End Page 116] Click for larger view View full resolution Heather O'Donoghue speaking at the Melville Society dinner at Balliol College Hall, Oxford, June 30, 2017. Photo courtesy of Brian Yothers. But I am getting ahead of myself. Back in London, a few events during the week were particularly memorable. The seriousness...

Introduction: Reading and Teaching Clarel

Introduction: Reading and Teaching Clarel Brian Yothers Critical neglect of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) constitutes the most perennial of tropes in discussions of Melville’s longest poem, even and especially as the poem gains more attention. By this point, we might draw back from describing Clarel as being neglected at all. It is available in two exemplary modern critical editions, Walter Bezanson’s 1960 Hendricks House edition and the 1991 Northwestern University Press/Newberry Library edition, which among its wealth of supporting material incorporates much of Bezanson’s scholarship. For use in the classroom, there is also an affordable Northwestern Newberry reader’s edition. Clarel has been a primary point of focus for no fewer than seven book-length studies: Joseph G. Knapp’s Tortured Synthesis (1971), Vincent Kenny’s Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography (1974), Larry Edward Wegener’s A Concordance to Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1979), Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (1993), Laura López Peña’s Beyond the Walls: Being with Each Other in Herman Melville’s Clarel (2015), and William Potter’s Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (2004) are devoted to Clarel in their entirety, and Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine: Melville, Mark Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (1999) devotes roughly half of its 300-plus pages to the poem. Additionally, the MLA International Bibliography lists 158 hits in response to an open search for Clarel, including books that devote substantial, and sometimes multiple, chapters to the poem; journal articles; and book chapters in edited volumes. Scholars who appear on this list (in addition to those above) include Nina Baym, Dennis Berthold, Jonathan A. Cook, Shirley Dettlaff, Edgar Dryden, James Duban, Jonathan Gellman, Bruce A. Harvey, Michael Jonik, Wyn Kelley, Amy Kaplan, Alfred Kazin, Martin Kevorkian, Timothy Marr, Cody Marrs, Robert Milder, Peter Norberg, Samuel Otter, Ilana Pardes, Hershel Parker, Gordon Poole, Basem Ra’ad, Peter Riley, Malini Johar Schueller, Bryan C. Short, William Shurr, Martyn Smith, William Spengemann, Robert K. Wallace, Tim Wood, [End Page 1] Brian Yothers, and Thomas Zlatic, among others. Two recent edited collections, Branka Arsić’s and K. L. Evans’s Melville’s Philosophies (2017) and Jonathan A. Cook’s and Brian Yothers’s Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion (2017), each devote multiple chapters to Melville’s Holy Land poem. If Clarel is not yet one of Melville’s greatest hits, it is at least far from invisible. The works cited list for this essay can serve as a select bibliography of the important work already devoted to Clarel. Even so, Clarel still bears the marks of a neglected text, especially because it still has not become a widely taught text. It remains infrequently taught at the graduate level and rare at the undergraduate level. In part, this state of affairs derives from the challenges we all face in teaching narrative poetry: if we excerpt Clarel, our students miss the opportunity to experience the poem as narrative, and if we do not excerpt it, we are left with a choice between omitting it from the syllabus altogether or teaching a five-hundred page poem—no easy dilemma to resolve. How might we make a case for teaching Clarel? We might start by noting its substantial place in Melville’s career. Melville is the author of American literature’s most frequently taught long work of prose fiction, Moby-Dick, and two of its most frequently taught works of shorter prose fiction, Billy Budd and “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” with “Benito Cereno” rapidly gaining ground. And yet Melville spent more time working on Clarel than he did on the composition of any of these works; aside from Moby-Dick itself, nothing in Melville’s canon matches Clarel’s extraordinarily ambitious scope. Protracted and difficult, Clarel may not be ideal material for American literature surveys and introduction to poetry classes, but it amply rewards investigation as part of an author course on Melville or as part of a more advanced course in American poetry, travel writing, literature and religion, and the literature of...

Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics

Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics Eliza Richards, Chair, Co-Organizer and Peter Riley, Co-Organizer Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in the “Dickinson, Melville, and Posthuman Poetics” panel at MLA 2016, from left to right: Eliza Richards, Stephanie Youngblood, Jason Bell, Brian Yothers, and Karen Leona Anderson. Photo courtesy of Maryse Jayasuriya. The panel explores how androcentric traditions of literary criticism have limited our understanding of nineteenth-century poets’ experiments with the categories of body, form, and environment. The four papers suggest that Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville located authorial sovereignty at an indeterminate juncture between the human and the non-human. Though these poets are typically imagined to be experimental because they are “before their time” or “proto-modern,” these papers show how nineteenth-century poetics speak to contemporary anxieties surrounding materiality and the possibility of political subjectivity, challenging the parameters of individualized lyric expression. Starting from the premise that many extant critical frameworks obstruct an ability to engage with (or detect) nineteenth-century decentered or othered articulations of the self, the presenters go on to suggest [End Page 138] that these articulations have a strong legacy in the twenty-first century. In conveying the possibilities of alternative configurations of sovereignty, they delineate a state of consciousness that eludes exceptionalist teleologies or totalizing representations of a lyric speaker. Through their poetic experiments, Melville and Dickinson ask us to question fully articulated contours of being and to think again about the coordinates of the self and its surroundings. 19th-Century Poetics in the 21st Century; or, What Melville and Dickinson Teach Us About 9/11 Stephanie Youngblood Tulsa Community College The relationship between testimony and literature is often understood through the framework of catastrophe or grief, but this emphasis on mourning encourages the perception that testimony is antithetical to politics. Nineteenth-century experimental poetics challenges that contention through indirect modes of response that facilitate political aesthetics. Specifically, lyric figures in Melville and Dickinson engage the so-called impossibility of representation that contemporary theorists, such as Jacques Rancière, say destroys the dissensus needed for politics. Lyric figures of voice, essential to traditional accounts of testimony, are central to the ways indirect aesthetic practices resist the normative bias that traditional testimony brings. Both Melville and Dickinson take up lyric through the figure of echo, which shifts lyric voice from a figure of connection with nature into a complex mixture of human and machine. Voice as echo is thus not simply a proto-modern fracturing of the self but instead points to the ways in which testimonial voice is always mediated by a mechanized reproduction; it is already a type of machine that challenges the equations we make between lyric voice and the figures of animation that seem to give it “life.” In Melville and Dickinson, echo both posits a Romantic notion of the origins of poetic voice and makes explicit the mechanistic means by which that voice—and testimonial response—emerge. Melville, Dickinson, and Unspeakable Nature Karen Leona Anderson St. Mary’s College From rhinoceros to mouse, from whale to insect: in this paper, I argue that the radical shifts in scale in Dickinson and Melville unmoor, sometimes violently and sometimes comically, a sense of scale predicated on human size and human understanding. Such unmooring challenges positivist forms of writing and reading. As alternatives, Dickinson offers the idealization of a language-less author and Melville offers an unreadable text. Human knowledge of [End Page 139] other “things” is displaced by a form of sociable intersubjectivity between objects. Dickinson’s scale-shifting nonhuman personifications of a wordless “Nature” were likely informed both by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s omnipotent poet in Nature and by Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s feminized and child-centered natural theology in “The Sinless Child.” But if “Nature” functions for many nineteenth-century writers as a reassuring solution to the problem of the unmanageable scales of the nonhuman, Dickinson’s “Nature” tends to emphasize that unmanageability, correcting not the chaos of the nonhuman world but the solipsism of the exceptional human subject. I present Melville’s scale-shifting anthropomorphism as a central question of Moby-Dick, as its protagonists toggle between empathy for the nonhuman and its...

Speaking of Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Speaking of Religion in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Brian Yothers COLEMAN, DAWN. Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. ix + 293 pp. $69.95 hardcover. GOLDBERG, SHARI. Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. viii + 197 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $33.99 ebook. KEVORKIAN, MARTIN. Writing Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville After the American Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xviii + 259 pp. $45.00 hardcover. The nineteenth-century American novel is sufficiently saturated in religious discourse that criticism often begins by taking the religious dimensions of novels from this period for granted, or else by observing religious allusions in passing on the way to more pressing matters. Dawn Coleman’s Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, Martin Kevorkian’s Writing Beyond Prophecy, and Shari Goldberg’s Quiet Testimony all consider how religious discourse provides both subject matter for nineteenth-century novels and also sources for emulation and competition. In each of these fine studies, the authors also attend to the ways in which nineteenth-century American novels interrogate discourse itself, reflecting self-consciously on the meaning of speaking and writing in religious and fictive contexts alike. The sermon and its novelistic representations and analogues loom particularly large for Dawn Coleman and Martin Kevorkian, while Shari Goldberg relies on the related, though not entirely coterminous, category of testimony to structure her study. The novel and the sermon can function as rivals for preeminence in nineteenth-century American literary culture, as Dawn Coleman points out in her illuminating study Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, but as she goes on to suggest, they also interpenetrate each other and inform each other on multiple artistic and conceptual levels. The sermon, as Coleman points out, had a great deal more cultural authority for [End Page 116] many Americans than did the novel, and indeed, Coleman provides a useful corrective for our present tendency to assume that the mid-nineteenth century is simply the era of the novel’s triumph. Coleman deals deftly with the central challenge that she identifies in writing about preaching: how to capture the particulars of a performance that necessarily involves both communal context and the personal charisma and even physicality of the preacher. While acknowledging that much of the experience of hearing a nineteenth-century sermon is inaccessible to us, Coleman makes extensive use of manuals for the preparation and presentation of sermons to show the affective responses that preachers strove to cultivate and the methods that they used to stimulate these responses. Coleman shows that the ethos of the preacher was central to the authority of the sermon, and that increasingly during the nineteenth century, preachers depended on a relationship with their audience to shape their sermons, with ministers ranging from Henry Ware, Jr., to Charles G. Finney arguing for an extemporaneous mode of address that would allow the preacher to play off the cues of a congregation rather than remaining tethered to a manuscript. After discussing the structure and significance of the nineteenth-century sermon, Coleman brings together a diverse cast of characters to illustrate the cultural struggle between novelists and preachers in the nineteenth century: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Wells Brown. Coleman shows how the novel competes with the sermon for cultural authority and addresses various aspects of the experience of lived religion in the nineteenth-century United States. The working class radical George Lippard is the least well-known of the figures Coleman discusses, and she ably extends the case that has been made for Lippard’s place in the nineteenth-century American canon by David S. Reynolds, Shelley Streeby, and Samuel Otter, among others. Lippard frequently parodies and critiques preachers and preaching, but as Coleman acutely suggests, his voice in The Quaker City: Or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) and other novels is also shaped by the forms of sermonic discourse. Lippard thus appears as both a critic of preaching and a preacher in his own right. Coleman suggests for several of the novelists she considers a seemingly unlikely sermonic source for...

Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author by Brian Yothers (review)

Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author by Brian Yothers (review)

All Astir

• Extracts All Astir P lans are progressing for the Ninth International Melville Society Conference , “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After,” to be held in Washington, D. C., from June 4 to June 7, 2013. The George Washington University will be hosting most of the plenary sessions and panels, and cultural events will take place at other venues in the city. The plenary speakers will be John Bryant (Hofstra University), Ed Folsom (University of Iowa), Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska, Lincoln), and Elizabeth Renker (Ohio State University). Details about the conference can be found on the Society webpage (melvillesociety.org) under the “Conferences and Events” tab and also on the conference Facebook page, “Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War Years and After.” The Society website has a new look, thanks to its editor Robert Sandberg. It now features three columns, instead of two, in a wider format. When you visit the site, in addition to getting the latest news about upcoming conferences and events, you can read items in two continuously updated newsfeeds from the New Bedford Whaling Museum: one announcing upcoming events and the other displaying the latest contributions to an online Flicker exhibit, “Signifying the Whale.” “Melville’s Marginalia Online,” edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon, continues to enhance its interface for the photographic display of books scanned or made available by Houghton Library, the Berkshire Athenaeum, Woodstock Theological Center, and the University of Virginia. Villanova University’s Digital Library has assisted the project. Recently mounted volumes include Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works and Sonnets and Wordsworth’s Poetical Works. The interface now includes a filtering option for displaying marked and annotated pages apart from unmarked content. The project invites feedback as well as financial support from users through designated links at http://melvillesmarginalia.org. Scott Norsworthy’s site, “Melvilliana,” which can be found at http://melvilliana.blogspot.com, contains a wealth of information and also links to other Melville-related sites and blogs. John Bryant, director of the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), reports significant progress as MEL completes the first year of its three-year NEH Scholarly Editions grant. Thanks to MEL programmer Nick Laiacona and his staff at Performant Software Solutions, development of TextLab, MEL’s manuscript transcription and print collation tool, is nearing completion. When c 2012 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 77 A L L A S T I R fully operational, TextLab will allow editors to build MEL’s “textual core,” consisting of all versions of Melville’s manuscript and published writings. Thanks also goes to MEL researchers on the TextLab team (Brett Barney, Les Harrison, Wes Raabe, Lewis Ullman, and Marta Werner), who have tested and will continue to test the tool throughout the year. In addition, Bryant and Associate Director Wyn Kelley met at MIT with HyperStudio’s director Kurt Fendt, programmer James Folsom, and associates Ayse Gursoy and Elyse Graham to share news about TextLab and to hear of HyperStudio’s development of Annotation Studio, which will be adapted to MEL as our “Melville Remix” workshop for annotating Melville texts and images. But even as MEL is building these tools (focusing for the time being on Moby-Dick, Battle-Pieces, and Billy Budd), other MEL teams are focusing on building content for annotation. MEL coeditors Dennis Berthold and Bob Wallace are supervising the Moby-Dick and Art project; Kelley and Brian Yothers are building a database of travel-related place names and coordinates for future mappings, and Timothy Marr and Tony McGowan are heading up the Battle-Pieces timeline annotation team. Bryant and Wallace are also supervising the gathering of images of Melville’s print collection from various affiliates: thus far, the Osborne Collection at Southwestern University (TX) and the Melville Society Archive at the New Bedford Whaling Museum have contributed images of over 50 items. Anyone interested in MEL should contact Bryant or Kelley and consider attending MELCamp4, a genial and informative...

Melville's mirrors: literary criticism and America's most elusive author

elville, I think, would have appreciated the scope of Brian Yothers's recent book. With rigor and grace, Melville's Mirrors examines a topic as vast and seemingly ungraspable as Ishmael's snowy phantom: the history of Melville criticism from 1920 to 2010. That scholarly archive is so large that, as Yothers notes, the MLA International Bibliography lists a stagger- ing 5,191 hits in response to a query for critical essays, books, and dissertation abstracts that take Herman Melville as a primary subject for their work (178). That number now surpasses 6,000 and is growing steadily, a fact that puts into perspective the achievement of Melville's Mirrors, which, in my estimation, is the most comprehensive and judicious study of Melville scholarship to date. The book might have been less successful had it been designed as one might reasonably expect: as a chronological narrative about the development of Melville criticism. Instead, Yothers constructs a taxonomy for the major lines of critical inquiry, a classifi catory system based on the family resemblances of various Melville studies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct strain of Mel- ville scholarship: Biographical and Textual Criticism; Literary Aesthetics and the Visual Arts; Religion, Ethics, and Epistemology; Gender, Sexual- ity, and the Body; Democracy, Nationalism, and War; and Race, Ethnicity, Empire, and Cosmopolitanism. Across the chapters, Yothers traces the history of these approaches, and the result is an erudite, and sometimes quite sur- prising, account of scholarship's longue durees. Chapter 1, for instance, charts a prehistory for the recent Melville biographies and digital archives by going back to Raymond Weaver, Lewis Mumford, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, and other members of the fi rst Melville Revival. In a similar vein, Chapter 2 yokes late twentieth- and early twenty-fi rst-century studies of Melville's verbal artistry to earlier—and today, rarely referenced—studies by R.P. Blackmur, Warner Ber- thoff, and William Ellery Sedgwick that examined the formal and aesthetic complexities of Melville's writing.