The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville

Now more than a century since the revival that placed Herman Melville at the center of the US literary canon, his work stands as one of the most important touchstones of world literature. The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville aims to reintroduce readers to a writer whom they think they know well by re-examining Melville’s entire corpus--the novels, short prose, and poetry--in light of the diversity and vibrancy of global Melville studies.

Bringing together the most innovative work of international scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville offers a comprehensive survey of both Melville’s writing and the new approaches it continues to introduce into literary studies. By engaging urgent discourses such as those around indigeneity and race, ecology and energy, gender and sexuality studies, and reimagining well-developed critical approaches to questions of literary history, politics, war, economics, aesthetics, and philosophy in Melville’s work, this Handbook seeks to push the study of Melville’s work into its second century. Attending to Melville’s origins--biographical and textual, intellectual and aesthetic, historical and political--the Handbook also examines Melville’s currency and contemporaneity, the ways that his writing continues to generate new thought and new art. This volume, in short, endeavors to present a new critical Melville for new critical times.

Jennifer Greiman, Associate Professor, Department of English, Wake Forest University, Michael Jonik, Reader in English, University of Sussex

Jennifer Greiman is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University. She specializes in 18th- and 19th-century Atlantic literatures, democratic theory, and the work of Herman Melville. Her latest book, Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form, was published in 2023. She is also the author of Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (2010), co-editor of The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (2013), and Associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

Michael Jonik teaches American literature and critical theory at the University of Sussex. He has published Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge 2018), and writes on pre-1900 American literature, continental philosophy, politics, and the history of science. He has held fellowships at the Cornell Society for the Humanities and the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies, and won research grants from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Reviews and Special Issues editor for the journal Textual Practice.