In this cultural history of Americans' engagement with Islam in the colonial and antebellum period, Timothy Marr analyzes the historical roots of how the Muslim world figured in American prophecy, politics, reform, fiction, art and dress. Marr argues that perceptions of the Muslim world, long viewed not only as both an anti-Christian and despotic threat but also as an exotic other, held a larger place in domestic American concerns than previously thought. Historical, literary, and imagined encounters with Muslim history and practices provided a backdrop where different Americans oriented the direction of their national project, the morality of the social institutions, and the contours of their romantic imaginations. This history sits as an important background to help understand present conflicts between the Muslim world and the United States.

In this cultural history of Americans' engagement with Islam in the colonial and antebellum period, Timothy Marr analyzes the historical roots of how the Muslim world figured in American prophecy, politics, reform, fiction, art and dress. Marr argues that perceptions of the Muslim world, long viewed not only as both an anti-Christian and despotic threat but also as an exotic other, held a larger place in domestic American concerns than previously thought. Historical, literary, and imagined encounters with Muslim history and practices provided a backdrop where different Americans oriented the direction of their national project, the morality of the social institutions, and the contours of their romantic imaginations. This history sits as an important background to help understand present conflicts between the Muslim world and the United States.

A collection of essays presented at the sesquicentenary Moby-Dick conference The twenty-one essays collected in "Ungraspable Phantom" are from an international conference held in 2001 celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick. The essays reflect not only a range of problems and approaches but also the cosmopolitan perspective of international scholarship. They offer new thoughts on familiar topics: the novel's problematic structure, its sources in and reinvention of the Bible, its Lacanian and post-Freudian psychology, and its rhetoric. They also present fresh information on new areas of interest: Melville's creative process, law and jurisprudence, Freemasonry and labor, race, Latin Americanism, and the Native American. Scholars, students, and readers of Moby-Dick will find this collection of essays fresh and insightful.