The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville

Now, more than a century since the revival that placed Herman Melville at the center of the US literary canon, his work stands as one of the most important touchstones of world literature. The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville aims to reintroduce readers to a writer whom they think they know well by reexamining Melville’s entire corpus—the novels, short prose, and poetry—in light of the diversity and vibrancy of global Melville Studies. Bringing together the most innovative work of international scholars, the Handbook offers a comprehensive survey of both Melville’s writing and the new approaches it continues to introduce into literary studies. By both engaging urgent discourses such as those around indigeneity and race, ecology and energy, gender and sexuality studies, and reimagining well-developed critical approaches to questions of literary history, politics, war, economics, aesthetics, and philosophy in Melville’s work, the Handbook seeks to push the study of Melville’s work into its second century. Attending to Melville’s origins—biographical and textual, intellectual and aesthetic, historical and political—the Handbook also examines Melville’s currency and contemporaneity, the ways that his writing continues to generate new thought and new art. This volume, in short, endeavors to present a new critical Melville for new critical times.