Melville's Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza
Tales-Herman Melville's only authorized collection of short fiction
published in his lifetime-and the first book to explore the rich
and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of
Melville's stories. As Christopher Sten shows, all of the stories
in The Piazza Tales present encounters between established white
male figures: a writer, a lawyer, a ship captain, a homeowner, an
architect, a world traveler, and characters who are outsiders,
minorities, outcasts, or "others": a seamstress, an office drudge,
enslaved Africans, a traveling salesman, island castaways, the
poor. In each, Melville concentrates on the trials of the human
body, its pain and trauma, its struggles and frustrations. Some
tales concern common trials such as illness or invalidism ("The
Piazza"), the tedium of office work ("Bartleby"), or the
aggravation of door-to-door salesmen ("The Lightning-Rod Man").
Others concern extraordinary trials: the traumatic violence of a
rebellion on a slave ship ("Benito Cereno"), the hardships of
surviving on a wasteland archipelago ("The Encantadas"), the perils
of creating a monstrous "man-machine" ("The Bell-Tower"). In their
concern for the cultural meanings of such trials, Melville's
stories look forward to the work of Michel Foucault, Raymond
Williams, and other cultural materialists who have shown how
cultures define, control, and oppress bodies based on their
otherness. As a storyteller, Melville understood how such cultural
dynamics operate and seized on our collective obsession with the
human body as subject, symbol, and vehicle to dramatize his tales.
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