Israel Potter (by Herman Melville)

This is Melville's Classic tale of a man that was exiled for fifty years.

After the Whale contextualizes Herman Melville's short fiction and poetry by studying it in the company of the more familiar fiction of the 1850s and 1890s. The study focuses on Melville's vision of the purpose and function of language from Moby-Dick through Billy Budd with a special emphasis on how language - in function and form - follows and depends on the function and form of the body, how Melville's attitude toward words echoes his attitude toward flesh.

Melville has long been regarded as an author of raw genius who knew, or cared, little about the art of the novel, and even harbored hostility toward its conventions. In The Weaver-God, He Weaves, Christopher Sten sets out to correct this widespread view, showing not only what Melville knew about the novelist's craft but how he appropriated and transformed a whole series of distinct genres: Typee is presented in the context of the popular romance, with its paired themes of sex and violence; Omoo is viewed in the framework of early Spanish and later French examples of the picaresque novel; and Mardi is seen as an instance of the once widely popular genre of the imaginary voyage. Sten also reveals how Melville radically transformed certain existing genres - the epic novel in Moby-Dick and the historical novel in Israel Potter - or forged profound new directions for genres still in their early stages - the psychological novel in Pierre and the experimental novel in The Confidence-Man. Sten speculatesthat it is,because Melville was so idiosyncratic and inventive that so few critics have understood his close relationship to the various novelistic forms.

Melville's interest in the visual arts and the translation of that interest into his writings is at the center of this new interdisciplinary study of one of America's most celebrated writers. Melville's lifelong engagement with the visual arts has been noted in other works, but only Savage Eye suggests the extraordinary depth and range of the author's multifaceted interest in the subject. Editor Christopher Sten has collected 13 essays from 12 specialists in the field to produce this ground-breaking study which connects Melville's writings with topics relating to the arts of painting, printmaking, sculpture, architecture, and landscape design, as well as art history. Sten's comprehensive introduction provides readers with a historical overview of the subject, detailing the many works of art Melville knew and commented upon at each stage of his career. He explains when and where in Melville's wanderings throughout America, Europe, and the Near East he saw these works, then describes how Melville made use of the life and work of these artists in his own fiction and poetry. The collection includes new essays on Moby Dick and J.M.W. Turner; Melville's fascination with Dutch genre painting; his appropriation of work by Cole and Vanderlyn for his magazine fiction; his use of early representations of the plague in Israel Potter; the relationship between the satirical cartoons of Daumier and the figures of The Confidence-Man; Timoleon's many artistic subjects; and the power of classical icons to shape the moral and aesthetic conflicts in Billy Budd. Also found here are theoretical essays on Melville and the picturesque; the modernism of Melville's aesthetic vision; his "anti-architectural"theory of literature; and his extensive reading in art history and art theory, from the classical to his own period. Savage Eye argues persuasively that the visual arts sources are comparable in importance to the literary arts i

Prior to World War II, the Japanese read such American writers as Washington Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne. Today young Japanese scholars turn their attention more and more to Herman Melville. This book is the first English-language volume of Japanese scholarship on Melville and includes chapters written by the leading scholars in Japan. It opens with chapters on Melville's reception in Japan and the literary interaction between Hawthorne and Melville. Two chapters are devoted to Moby-Dick and one to Melville's transcendentalism. Additional chapters cover Israel Porter, The Confidence Man, Clarel, Melville's later poetry, and Billy Budd. The volume concludes with a bibliographical essay on Japanese scholarship.