The Pacific has been treated as a region where systems of economic and cultural control generate a uniformity that mimics paradise. It also serves as a global, oceanic circulatory system for routes ...of commerce in whaling, armaments, and food production. Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and the New Zealand writer Ian Wedde oscillate between historical narratives of Pacific islands and transcendental antinarratives in which history is subsumed by timeless, universalized space.
...there is an expectation that literary and filmic representations of the supernatural will somehow involve the proverbial "haunted house." According to Marcellus Blount, "even though African ...American critical theory has slowly come into its own, theorists have yet to give black poets their proper voice in constructing an African American literary tradition" (Blount, 1992). The material experience of participating in "Red Rover" positions the classroom audience to be more receptive to a reconsideration of migration; this energy can then be redirected into an academically rigorous analysis of themes of migration in critically acclaimed work such as Jhumpa Lahiri's short story "When Mr. Pirzada Came To Dine" from her Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection The Interpreter of Maladies (2000) and Kiran Desai's novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Fiction Award. Norman Miller, Indiana State University William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were two of the most influential figures in English romantic poetry, if not the most influential. ...they produced some of the most beautiful and awe inspiring poetry ever written.
Hypnaesthesis argues for understanding somnambulism, nightmare, and insomnia as aesthetic categories in the gothic and dark romantic traditions of antebellum American literature that provide critical ...insights into the experiential costs of the exhortations to normative vigilance prevalent in the American Enlightenment. During this period unceasing vigilance became the watchword for liberty as the Lockean conception of the self, understood as dependent on waking consciousness, fused with Protestant and Enlightenment ideas about salvation, productivity, and freedom to form the philosophical and political core of American identity. By exploring the nocturnal territory of thought through aesthetic experience in the works of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, I show how American literature provides alternative paths for post-enlightenment thinking, introducing sleep as a fundamental problem for reimagining subjectivity and collectivity. Beginning with the category of somnambulism in Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), I show how an emergent medico-literary understanding of the nervous self in the eighteenth century provided an opening for identifying a novel form of sharedness in the pre-subjective affect that I call somnipathy, adapting the nineteenth-century definition of this term from Noah Webster’s 1848 American Dictionary of the English Language: “sleep from sympathy, or by the process of mesmerism.” The interconnected sense of life arising from somnipathy established the foundation, in my account, for the aesthetic category of nightmare developed in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) by Robert Macnish, who later created an hypnotic formula for inducing the feeling of horror specific to nightmare in fiction. Under the influence of Macnish’s short stories for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Poe pushed nightmare experience to its natural limit with his ontological portrait of insomnia in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), somnipathically conveying the crushing sense of isolation and despair arising from a society that systematically denies the necessity of sleep. I conclude with an analysis of Melville’s theorization of the sleep drive as a political problem in Moby-Dick (1851) and “Bartleby” (1853), revealing how a critical interpretation of insomnia and nightmare phenomena may give rise to the perception of the necessity of sleep as a common right belonging to each (political) animal.
If, in the wake of abundant recent criticism on what are still referred to as Melville's late works (those collected in The Piazza Tales as well as Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd), ...Weaver's assessment seems almost a dismissible anachronism, contending with the steep decline in extant writing and publications from the last half of Melville's life is far from currently irrelevant.1 In 2005, Andrew Delbanco's biography invoked Weaver's closing chapter, "The Long Quietus," in naming Melville's last decades "The Quiet End," effectively reprising, rather than surpassing, the question that insists as one nears the conclusion of his predecessor's work: what is there to say about one who, after 1859, seems to have said little? The experiences of those devastated by slavery were silenced, and so subsist in the silences of American history; to address these gaps without collapsing them as "quiet ends" is to approach apparent absence as essential context.2 It is my contention that Benito Cereno figures the complexity of writing about the silences of an obscured past, insisting on a revision of the terms of authorship that have been predominantly used to approach the suffering that neither fictional nor official archives capture on record.3 Attending further to the reading such revision requires, Benito Cereno ultimately suggests a theory of responding to evasive testimonies.
Comparing Navio dos Negros, Jorge Silva Melo's adaptation of Benito Cereno in 2000 (Lisbon, Culturgest) to Melville's narrative, several plots of dislocation and repossession emerge. In Melville, the ...core tale of the Atlantic slave trade initiated by the Iberian diasporic experience sustains the plot of the slaveholder's ambiguous claim to oppression and protection and interferes with the American narrator's exegetic endeavors. Social identity mapping becomes problematic in a comedy of errors that multiplies possible readings and foregrounds the trappings of authority and authorship. In fact, though the "Spaniards" may be taken as a synecdoche for the colonizer, the Portuguese are relegated to the social and linguistic margins, namely in the passage of the text where a revelation of (some) mystery is hinted at but remains encrypted in a foreign language. The play by Silva Melo expands and disrupts the semantics of diaspora by creating a contemporary parallel narrative in which the Portuguese are consigned to the role of oppressors of modern-day immigrants from Eastern European countries and from the former Portuguese colonies. However, the political message of guilt and victimization is upset by the deceptive layers of storytelling that the stage director takes from Melville, thus foregrounding the narrative's textual fabric. With a minimalistic set-design, where the few props are constantly being reassembled as the storytellers interweave the narrative, the actors (Silva Melo's Artistas Unidos) are both readers and narrators, who invite the audience to question authoritative interpretations.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Historians and critics of antebellum literary economics will hail the arrival of The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of ...American Publishing by Michael Everton. In a readable and spirited prose style saturated with historical specificity, Everton provides a broad and deep appreciation of the diverse voices of "the grand chorus of complaint" at this crucial phase in the development of American publishing, a period remarkable for its lack of codified law governing business practice in a culture obsessed with morality. The table is now set for future research into precisely which tactical shifts occurred in the trade that were accepted among publishers and which were rejected, and which grew to define the industry, particularly in the context of such long-term author-publisher relationships as Bonner-Fern, Duyckinck-Meville, and Murray-Irving. ...literary biographers, and indeed biographers of editors and publishers, have much to learn from this landmark study.
While dozens of naturalists had examined discrete Pacific environments prior to the 1830s, the American geologist James Dwight Dana was the first to hypothesize the underlying forces that created and ...unified this vast ocean basin as a whole. During his four-year journey with the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–1842), Dana developed a holistic view of geological systems throughout the Pacific, including those continental lands soon claimed by the United States as its Far West. But Dana's innovative work on Pacific geology and his extra-continental reading of the Far West changed in the 1850s. Like other American explorer-geologists who found cause for reifying a continental geology, Dana's work lost sight of the Pacific Basin and instead focused on the exceptional and spiritually preordained structure of American landforms.
Philadelphia, to hear of Mr. Franklin's fear and about chess as a metaphor for controlling it (this chapter includes much that will not be familiar to everybody); to Boston for Phyllis Wheatley's ...attempts to escape loss and death by salvation (the most forced chapter - Wertheimer is anxious to say that religion is incidental to fear in Wheatley's poetry when his own evidence suggests it is integral); Hartford for Noah Webster's "Foundations" of charitable cooperatives, legal certainty in contracts and copyright and cultural and linguistic surety in the Dictionary (the passage on the Dictionary is easily the most fascinating in the book and has made this reviewer go, at last, deeper into H. L. Mencken than the Prejudices); New York and Herman Melville (the chapter most apt for expansion); and Boston again, for a discussion of Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance."
Canon is a construct that has been under scrutiny since the 1960s. And while the general consensus is that canon must be more inclusive and open up, a plausible solution to this dilemma has not been ...suggested yet. This dissertation proposes to do away with the metaphor of canon as a way of measuring literature’s merits, and replace it with another metaphor. For the sake of this study, the metaphor of conversation is a proposed metaphor. By looking at how canonical structure has impacted certain writers, this study looks at the way in which “conversation” can open up the study of literature and how it may democratize that same study.
