The Cod and the Whale

Melville in the Time of Extinction

Bibliographic Data

ID3136788
AuthorsJohn Levi Barnard (College of Wooster, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume89
Issue4
Pages851-879
Publication date2017-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00029831-4257892
OpenAlexW2776194269
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited34

This essay tracks the interrelated histories of the cod and the whale from John Smith’s colonial American vision of abundance to the near disappearance of the living resources he described as inexhaustible. Working at the intersections of animal studies, food studies, and the environmental humanities—and considering cultural artifacts from Smith’s tracts and Herman Melville’s fiction to Cheryl Savageau’s poetry and the underwater sculpture of Jason deCaires Taylor—the essay reads the commodification and consumption of these creatures as constitutive elements of an extinction-producing economy. Within this reading, the cod and the whale appear as exemplary figures not only for the important distinction between the edible and the exotic animal—wild food and wildlife—but also for the larger historical relation between “animal capital” and mass extinction

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Biology · Commodification · Commodity · Consumption (sociology · Creatures · Economics · Economy · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Extinction (optical mineralogy · Fish · Fish <Actinopterygii> · Fishery · Natural (archaeology · Political science · Reading (process · Whale · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy

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