Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of
Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his
retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of
three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. Conceived
separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, the ten
essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work,"
as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life, '" which for
Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational
life. Four of the ten essays deal with Melville's life and work
after his novelistic career ended with the The Confidence-Man in
1857. The range of issues addressed in the essays includes
Melville's attitudes toward society, history, and politics, from
broad ideas about democracy and the course of Western civilization
to responses to particular events like the Astor Place Riots and
the Civil War; his feeling about sexuality and, throughout the
book, about religion; his relationship to past and present writers,
especially to the phases of Euro-American Romanticism,
post-Romanticism, and nascent Modernism; his relationship to his
wife, Lizzie, to Hawthorne, and to his father, all of whom figured
in the crisis that made for Pierre. The title essay, "Exiled
Royalties," takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger,
darker, deeper part of Ahab"--Melville's mythic projection of a
"larger, darker, deeper part" of himself. How to live nobly in
spiritual exile--to be godlike in the perceptible absence of
God--was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of
positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to
literature. The ways in which this impulseexpressed itself through
Melville's forty-five year career, interweaving itself with his
personal life and the life of the nation and shaping both the
matter and manner of his work, is the unifying subject of Exiled
Royalties.
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