Pursuing Melville 1940 1980

Pursuing Melville collects fourteen representative chapters and essays out of nearly fifty pieces written between 1940 and 1980 by this influential Melville scholar, drawing also on his extensive correspondence of those years concerning Melville and Melvilleans. The selections range from a previously unpublished graduate seminar paper of 1940 through later articles and books to an authoritative study of Melville and the Platonic tradition composed especially for this volume. Presented chronologically, these writings reflect not only the development of Professor Sealts's own thinking but also the direction taken by Melville scholarship generally over a period of forty years. The book conveys its author's evident love of his subject and the enthusiasm with which he has shared his findings, in his classroom and in his publications. A variety of readers can consult it with pleasure and profit--those making their first acquaintance with Melville and his works, more advanced students who are learning the methodology of literary study, and those scholars who deal professionally with American literature, American literary scholarship, and the cultural history of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. As his Preface observes, Professor Sealts has been an explorer of five recurrent themes: Melville's reading, first in philosophy and then in general literature; his shorter fiction, from his magazine writing of the 1850s through Billy Budd, Sailor, the fruit of his last years; his three seasons of lecturing between 1857 and 1860; his relations with certain relatives, friends, and early biographers; and, along with all the rest, his distinctive temperament and personality, which are as enigmatic and alluring as the books he wrote.

If America is a nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals, then why are so many of its most celebrated pieces of literature so dark? American Terror returns to the question of American literature's distinctive tone of terror through a close study of three authors—Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville—who not only wrote works of terror, but who defended, theorized, and championed it. Combining updated historical perspectives with close reading, Paul Hurh shows how these authors developed terror as a special literary affect informed by the way the concept of thinking becomes, in the wake of Enlightenment empiricism, increasingly defined by a set of austere mechanic processes, such as the scientific method and the algebraic functions of analytical logic. Rather than trying to find a feeling that would transcend thinking by subtending reason to emotion, these writers found in terror the feeling of thinking, the peculiar feeling of reason's authority over emotional schemes. In so doing, they grappled with a shared set of enduring questions: What is the difference between thinking and feeling? Why does it seem impossible to reason oneself out of an irrational fear? And what becomes of the freedom of the will when we discover that affects can push it around?

The Lost Soul of American Politics is a provocative new interpretation of American political thought from the Founding Fathers to the Neo-Conservatives. Reassessing the motives and intentions of such great political thinkers as Madison, Thoreau, Lincoln, and Emerson, John P. Diggins shows how these men struggled to create an alliance between the politics of self-interest and a religious sense of moral responsibility—a tension that still troubles us today.

These lucid essays, though varied in subject, have the commonality of an emphasis on teaching. The first essay, entitled "Emerson as Teacher," demonstrates how Emerson "provoked and inspired and educated his students - and his students' students.".

“Many of the selections have become standard studies and interpretations: Sherman Paul on “The Town-Ho’s Story,’ R. W. B. Lewis on Melville and Homer, Merton Sealts on Melville’s “I and My Chimney,’ to name only a few. The quality of the selections is very high indeed, as was true of earlier volumes in this series. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice

An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.

A detailed account of Herman Melville's life during the Civil War, as well as study of his war epic, Battle-Pieces.

Arguing that Melville saw writing as a series of attempts to reach an unreachable union of word and thought ("voicing the voiceless"), Bryant shows how Melville attempted to place the reader in an equivalent condition of "tense repose." He posits that Melville incorporated laughter into his writing as a means of teasing the reader into deeper thought. To this end, Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale, thus creating his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose.".