A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

This brilliant, original collection of essays on Melville's life and writing makes the case for his centrality both to nineteenth-century writing in America and also to America's understanding of itself. No American literary artist has ever known his fellow citizens in greater depth.

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This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, 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-century American writing.