In the whalebone leg worn by Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Melville invents one of the most famous prostheses in the history of the novel. What imaginative labour, that novel asks, is required to force inanimate matter to take on the attributes of life? How do we convert the heavy stuff of which we are made – of which a hostile and inhuman world is made – into the living expression of mind?

This essay explores Melville’s response to this question, particularly as it unfolds in his novella Benito Cereno. The prosthetic logic that is at work in Moby Dick reaches a certain intensity in this short work – where it becomes entangled with the question of racial difference, the question that is at the heart too of the discussion, in Moby Dick, of the ‘whiteness of the whale’. In Benito Cereno, the relation between the white master Cereno and the black manservant Babo is conceived as a prosthetic one. Babo is described as acting as ‘a sort of crutch’ to Cereno, a black extension of white power. The narrator’s capacity to read the power dynamic between Cereno and Babo, between master and servant, depends on the terms in which he conceives of this crutch. If Melville’s novella might be read as a critique and a performance of the process by which a form of black power expresses itself, outside of the terms of what Toni Morrison calls the ‘ideology of whiteness’, then that reading requires us to understand how the capacity for revolutionary self-expression is woven, in Melville’s fiction, into the prosthetic extensions in which it materialises itself.

Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

Herman Melville’s most famous illustrator, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) designed and illustrated Moby Dick in 1930. At the same time, he was writing and illustrating his own book, N by E, an account of his recent misadventures on the crew of a small boat sailing to Greenland. In both projects, Kent depicted ship, ocean, sailor, and creature with obsessive accuracy. Such a devoted socialist that he donated a trove of paintings to the Soviet Union in 1960 even after revelations about the regime that disillusioned many lifelong socialists, he was also a keen observer of the coastlines of Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, and the Arctic. The specificity of his knowledge and the fervor with which he sought out adventures show in his inky, fantastic tableaus and head- and tailpieces for Moby Dick. His edition coincided with and helped solidify Melville’s canonization in the twentieth century – the so-called Melville revival – while also reaching a new kind of reader through the Book-of-the-Month Club. His was perhaps the most beloved American illustrated reprint of its time, and certainly the best known of the reprints examined here.

Though lauded as radically generically innovative, David Foster Wallace’s work – both in characteristics and range – has a number of antecedents in nineteenth-century Anglophone and other traditions, which ultimately illuminate the relationship between the two main hallmarks of his work: ethical gesture and stylistic complexity. As his reviews and comments on other authors and cultural trends make clear, Wallace was both a debunker of grand claims (in the manner of the Melville who said Emerson gave the impression that “had he lived in those days in which the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions”) and a maker of such claims himself. He was obviously deeply indebted to – and may even have represented a baroque final development of – a consistent nineteenth-century American emphasis (strengthened through the movement for the abolition of slavery) on sympathetic identification as a primary social resource. Wallace combines nineteenth-century literary figures’ blend of the essayistic with the fundamental trajectory of the bildungsroman, within fiction and nonfiction. Through an analysis of Wallace’s forebears and influences, focusing on the American nineteenth century, this chapter proposes that Wallace in fact played the role of a nineteenth-century novelist (at once cultural commentator and artist) in a postmodern context. While Wallace’s ethics always seems starkly accessible, his brand of literariness does not. This is because he brings two central animating features of nineteenth-century American writing’s interventions to their most acute, impossible point: Sympathy becomes incapacitating dissolution, and educative realism approaches unreadability. Understanding this background also provides a new context for the recent diminution of Wallace’s personal reputation: His ethical appeals are not only a hypocritical contrast to private conduct but also an indispensable strategy for a formal obscurity that still sought transformative relevance.

The conclusion examines Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno, a novella of shipboard slave revolt, which imagines the Haitian Revolution as a hidden source of fashion and style. Melville’s tale also gestures toward the dominant tropes that would emerge in the later nineteenth century—the stories of zombis, vodou, and cannibalism as well as the constant preoccupation with natural disaster, disease, political corruption, and abject poverty that would predominate by the early twentieth century. Those tropes emerged in response to and often continued to reanimate the early history of Haitian revolutionary performances.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

In September 1862, readers of the short-lived Continental Monthly might have encountered the following prediction by prominent editor and sometime politician Horace Greeley: The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellant [sic] commonwealths, but a true exemplification of “many in one” – many stars blended in one common flag – many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls.1

This essay focuses on the year 1855, which saw the publication of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Herman Melville’s Israel Potter. In looking at how these two publications present American history, the essay deemphasizes the relation of these two authors to what is coming (the Civil War, and their poetry on it) and instead considers the whole of the period not as an antebellum period but a bellicose period, marked by continual warfare.

More than four decades before the USA and Spain engaged in the open warfare that resulted in the end of direct Spanish imperialism in the western hemisphere, a minor diplomatic incident nearly plunged the two countries into early war. On February 28, 1854, the cargo steamship the Black Warrior entered the port of Havana as it had dozens of times previously, but on this occasion, the ship was seized by the Spanish colonial authorities. Under the leadership of Captain Bullock, the ship, with its cargo of goods and transit passengers, was detained, accused of failing to pay taxes on the commercial goods. A dispute over a mere technicality about the ship’s right to modify its customs declarations escalated into a full-blown international incident that immediately drew national and international attention, and even US President Pierce and the House of Representatives issued an official public inquiry into the matter.1 After several weeks of tense exchange and negotiations, the ship and its cargo were released with a fine of approximately $6000. The matter had, it seemed, been put to rest; however, the fallout of the affair simmered and intensified, threatening to trigger a war and exposing some of the most important issues affecting the nation.

In The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (1976), Nina Baym argues that rather than reading Hawthorne’s works in isolation from one another, critics should read them chronologically in “the context they provide for each other” and as reflecting their author’s “literary sensibility” as it changed over time.1 The shapes of the careers of some of the other figures in this section are well known: Herman Melville was a popular author of sea yarns who withdrew from the market after his popularity declined, leaving Billy Budd in manuscript at his death; Emily Dickinson was a manuscript poet whose productivity ebbed and flowed over several decades, while Walt Whitman revised and expanded his Leaves of Grass many times over nearly half a century; and Frederick Douglass had long careers as both a prominent orator and published author.

“Amidst his gray philosophizing, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities1 In the decades since Stanley Cavell’s provocation in Senses of Walden that nineteenth-century American philosophy is perhaps best found in the “metaphysical riot of its greatest literature,”2 critics have charted with renewed interest how writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Douglass, and Whitman have responded to and challenged the philosophical tradition. They have explored how these writers anticipate philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze, and how contemporary philosophers from Giorgio Agamben to Slavoj Žižek have used pallid Melville as a cipher for their own conceptual systems.3 At the same time, critics have articulated how nineteenth-century American writers offer unique philosophies; how their writings blur literature and philosophy, as well as science and psychology; and how they develop their own philosophies of democracy, race, and sexuality.4 For Elizabeth Duquette, recent philosophical investigations of American literature have highlighted the importance “of the practice and place of philosophy in nineteenth-century American literature” and inspired scholars to “reexamine assumptions about abstraction, and what we do when we read a literary text.”5 It is not only a question of recognizing that writers such as Dickinson or Poe, Melville or Douglass are themselves perspicuous readers of philosophy, or that they make philosophical interventions of their own. These writers also push us to rethink issues of representation, interpretation, expression, style, and form. Given the wealth of recent philosophical readings of American literature, then, one might even be tempted to consider the study of American literature and philosophy as an emergent subfield.

The mid-1800s in the United States witnessed not only a revolution in market capitalism but also in literature. This essay, accordingly, covers an era in which both capitalism took command of social life in the United States and literary discourse attempted to elevate itself into Literature. The cultural reach of the market, as evidenced by increasing textual engagements with Wall Street as a metonym for US finance, intensified at the same time as Romantic writers like Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden to live deliberately and fictional characters like Bartleby preferred not to. Scholars have imagined these two developments as opposite or separate spheres that, perhaps through the evolution of professional authorship, occasionally rubbed up against one another: literature and economics. This account holds that although literature could not escape its mediated relationship with readers through the marketplace, literary discourse attempted to transcend the sordid realities of capitalism.1 And, concomitantly, economic writing, in one influential account of nineteenth-century political economy, veered toward facts to distinguish itself from imaginative literature.2 Generically, then, these two domains started to diverge in the mid-century, a migration that at the same time illuminates literature’s propensity to function as economics.3

This chapter argues for the rebirth of pastoral in the twenty-first century: as a genre responsive to climate change, mindful of the extinction of many species, and bearing the unique insights of indigenous peoples, with their memory of past catastrophes and their vision for a sustainable future. Woven into this argument are three classic American authors -- Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville – each preoccupied with the subjection of Native peoples, but imagining very different fates for them. In Irving, the ruthless ascendency of colonial settlers makes Native demise a foregone conclusion. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, tells a more conflicting story. In spite of the casual reference to the “extinction” of the Pequots, the persistence of Native characters throughout the novel suggests that they might be here to stay. It is Tashtego’s “red arm and hammer” that we see at the book’s climactic end. Thoreau also equivocates, at one point showing the Abenaki as more firmly ensconced in their habitat than he himself can ever be. In this way, he looks forward to the pastoral affirmation of indigenous survival in the philosophy of Kyle Powys Whyte, and the climate activism of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

The Postlude offers a brief discussion of Forster’s listening to Hugo Wolf’s lieder in 1935 and a reflection on the limits of past gay discussion of Forster’s contribution to the opera Billy Budd. It suggests that a renewed close investigation into the relation between text and its historical context enables us to uncover the complexity in Forster’s ideology and generate fresh readings of his work. If the political energy of his comment on Hugo Wolf’s music reminds us of the political suggestiveness of his references to music, the revelation of the whiteness of Billy Budd is a timely signal, for readers in the twenty-first century, to reach beyond existing critical parameters and stay alert to the conditioning forces of our own perspectives. At the heart of Forster’s engagement with and representations of music is his protean interest in a broad range of topical subjects and political issues. The Postlude suggests that it is necessary to acknowledge and interpret the multiple frontiers of Forster’s ideological exploration and the many concerns he registers and raises in his writing.

America’s wars have always prompted works of literature that confront the subject of death and commemoration. This essay opens with an overview of relevant genres and conventions, both in poetry and prose, spawned by America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War. Attention then turns to various memorial texts during World War I, and book-length literary responses to death during the Great War, World War II, and the American War in Vietnam. The essay highlights personal and public interpretations of death in Melville’s Battlepieces and Aspects of the War, World War I-era representations of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” and Across the River and Into the Trees, and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country.

In this first of paired chapters bearing down on the evolutionary history and philosophy of literary language, Victorian narratives differently concerned with the term “medium” – George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – undergo an intensive reading that opens directly onto Giorgio Agamben’s investigations into the always mysterious ontological conjuncture of idea and its sayability, object and its name, in human discourse – and since then onto conceptual poet John Cayley’s theory of “grammalepsy.” Literary examples of prose under duress, from Herman Melville to D. H. Lawrence, return reading to a more close-grained application of Agamben’s poetics (rather than ontology), where the “give” – and take back – of a medium’s oscillatory potential can only be played out before us, tacitly at least, in a foundational contrast to the logic (following Agamben) of the non-extensive point in calculus, the signifying unit that has, unlike syllabic language, no subsidiary elements.

A volume on the Bible and literature affords an opportunity to explore the conjunction of these terms in relation to a writer whose great work Moby-Dick (1851) – the story of the hunting-down of a white whale by an obsessed sea captain – came to have, after Melville’s lifetime, a mythic role for his nation and for the Western world. Melville’s life (1819–91) spanned the nineteenth century and he was one of its outstanding thinkers. His work throughout is profoundly influenced by biblical texts. This essay, noting the influence of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, highlights both their capacity to help Melville think through the problems of his age, and their influence on his understanding of the power of story and the capacities of language. After a brief account of Melville’s formative years, the essay considers a long passage from Moby-Dick for the complexity of its resonances with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. A discussion of the role of Wisdom in Melville’s long dramatic poem Clarel follows, with emphasis on the book of Job. A late sketch, “Daniel Orme” offers, through the figure of Daniel, material for a final reflection on Melville’s role as thinker and visionary for his society.

Romanticism and realism are not diametrically opposed, and the history of the terms “romance” and “novel” reveal dialogical genre processes. Optative romanticism in Europe and America is in tension with negative romanticism. The principal American romance tradition is largely one of a dark romanticism, in which the gothic and grotesque merge with realism in the “romance-novel,” as in the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and later modernist and postmodernist writers. Four basic modes of Gothic can be identified ontologically as: indeterminate “historical” Gothic; determinate “rationalized” Gothic; determinate “supernatural” Gothic; indeterminate “equivocal” Gothic. The ambiguous fourth mode may involve questions of metaphysics, epistemological uncertainty, psychological instability, and textual indeterminacy. The fourth mode characterizes the fictions of Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville – strikingly exemplified by the pervasive theme of “inscrutability” in Moby-Dick, McCarthy’s favorite book.