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This is the first major effort in twenty years to reassess the
relationship between Melville and Hawthorne.Herman Melville and
Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an
intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive
tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social
ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical
applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical
studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number
of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities
existing between the two writers.Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S.
Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known
biographical facts of the two writers' relationship and an overview
of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow
broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a
question that ""looms like a grand hooded phantom"" over the field
of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence - Hawthorne's
on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville's on The Blithedale Romance,
to mention only the most obvious instances - are also discussed.
The other topics covered include professional competitiveness;
Melville's search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the
marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism,
transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and
Melville's times.Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical
issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are
informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new
historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities
that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American
culture.
Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a
collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how
fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging
technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture,
photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the
twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout
these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are
juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most
prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville
and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of
performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical
theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about
racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography
with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays
provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the
formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.
Melville's City argues that Melville's relationship to the city was
considerably more complex than has generally been believed. By
placing him in the historical and cultural context of
nineteenth-century New York, Kelley presents a Melville who
borrowed from the colourful cultural variety of the city while at
the same time investigating its darker and more dangerous social
aspects. She shows that images both from Melville and from popular
sources of the time represented New York variously as Capital,
Labyrinth, City of Man and City of God and she goes on the
demonstrate that he resisted a generalising or totalising
representation of the city by revealing its hybrid identity and
giving voice to the poor, the displaced and the racially excluded.
Through close examination of works spanning Melville's career,
Kelley forges an analysis of connections between urban and literary
form.
Melville's City argues that Melville's relationship to the city is considerably more complex than has generally been believed. By placing him in the historical and cultural context of nineteenth-century New York, Kelley presents a Melville who borrows from the colorful cultural variety of the city while at the same time investigating its darker and more dangerous social aspects. Through examination of works spanning Melville's career, she forges a new analysis of the connections between urban and literary form.
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