MAP: MOBY DICK
Voyage of the Pequod, a literary map by Everett Henry based on Moby Dick. Published between 1953 and 1964 by the Harris-Seybold Company of Cleveland. Available online at the Library of Congress.
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Background Research 
Scribner Writers Series [Database]
Essay on the life and works of Herman Melville, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
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Literature Resource Center [DATABASE] Critical Essays on Herman Melville
The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (2013) by
The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville provides timely, critical essays on Melville's classic works. The essays have been specially commissioned for this volume and provide a complete overview of Melville's career. Melville's major novels are discussed, along with a range of his short fiction and poetry, including neglected works ripe for rediscovery. The volume includes essays on such new topics as Melville and oceanic studies, Melville and animal studies, and Melville and the planetary, along with a number of essays that focus on form and aesthetics. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, this New Companion brings together a team of leading international scholars to offer students of American literature the most comprehensive introduction available to Melville's art.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9781107023130
Interpretation and Criticism
Journal Articles
Books, essays, and journal articles indexed in MLA International Bibliography [Database]
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Wharton scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
Specific Articles...
"Two Discoveries Concerning Herman Melville," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1975, [JSTOR]
"Property and Selfhood in Herman Melville's Pierre," Jeffory A. Clymer, Ninettenth-Century Literature, 2006 [JSTOR]
Melville: Fashioning in Modernity (2014) by
Melville: Fashioning in Modernity considers all of the major fiction with a concentration on lesser-known work, and provides a radically fresh approach to Melville, focusing on: clothing as socially symbolic; dress, power and class; the transgressive nature of dress; inappropriate clothing; the meaning of uniform; the multiplicity of identity that dress may represent; anxiety and modernity. The representation of clothing in the fiction is central to some of Melville's major themes; the relation between private and public identity, social inequality and how this is maintained; the relation between power, justice and authority; the relation between the "civilized" and the "savage." Frequently clothing represents the malleability of identity (its possibilities as well as its limitations), represents writing itself, as well as becoming indicative of the crisis of modernity. Clothing also becomes a trope for Melville's representations of authorship and of his own scene of writing. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity also encompasses identity in transition, making use of the examination of modernity by theorists such as Anthony Giddens, as well as on theories of figures such as the dandy. In contextualizing Melville's interest in clothing, a variety of other works and writers is considered; works such as Robinson Crusoe and The Scarlet Letter, and novelists such as Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Jack London, and George Orwell. The book has at its core a consideration of the scene of writing and the publishing history of each text.
Call Number: Miller PS2387 .M34 2014ISBN: 9781623563677
African Culture and Melville's Art (2008) by
Here is that rare work that in research and interpretation is original almost from beginning to end. For the first time we discover that slave music and dance are used by Melville in Moby-Dick in the creation of some of his most tragic and avant-garde art. Just as previously unknown Africanpractices, found in travel accounts, reveal a powerful symbolic link between Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick, Frederick Douglass's formulation of joy-sorrow in slave life and music leads to the discovery of a blues aesthetic in Moby-Dick that is full of implications for American culture and the craft ofwriting. In the future, neither Benito Cereno nor Moby-Dick, should be read as before, for important passages in each spring from Melville's magnificent treatment of a source common to each.In still more ways, Melville in this volume in not the Melville we have known. Especially in Benito Cereno, the creation of principal characters, symbols, and scenes is drawn from sources hidden in obscurity for roughly a century and a half. Though African influences predominate, Latin American,European, and North American influences are also woven masterfully into the design of the novella. As emphases among them shift back and forth, Melville's art, stunning in its range and subtlety, shimmers with previously undisclosed brilliance. Targeting how he conceived and executed his art, wefind in this volume a degree of heretofore unprobed intertexuality in his own work and reveal the other volumes that informed his creative process.
Call Number: Miller PS2387 .S78 2009ISBN: 9780195372700
Melville, Mapping and Globalization (2009) by
In Melville, Mapping and Globalization, Robert Tally argues that Melville does not belong in the tradition of the American Renaissance, but rather creates a baroque literary cartography, artistically engaging with spaces beyond the national model. At a time of intense national consolidation and cultural centralization, Melville discovered the postnational forces of an emerging world system, a system that has become our own in the era of globalization. Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville's distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville's hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
Call Number: Miller PS2387 .T35 2009ISBN: 9780826471512
Herman Melville
Herman Melville 1885 by George G. Rockwood, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1819-1891
Nationality: American
Literary Periods:
Romantic Period,
American Naturalistic and Symbolistic Period, 1900-1930
Modernist Period, 1899-1945
Twentieth Century, 1900-1999
MELVILLE LETTER
Letter from Herman Melville to Evert Duyckinck by Meade Minnigerode, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons