a new companion to herman melville

Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways.

Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated.

In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hem-ispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers:

• A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work
• Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel
• Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville
• In-depth examinations of Melville’s treatment of the natural world
• Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement

A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Wyn Kelley is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996), Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008), and, with Henry Jenkins, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom (2013). Formerly Associate Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (2000-2011), she is currently Associate Director of the Melville Electronic Library.

Christopher Ohge is Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He also serves as Associate Director of the Melville Electronic Library and an associate editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, and previously served as an associate editor at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The author of the book Inventions of the Text: Editing, Computing, and Publishing Archives of Experience (2021), his other published work has appeared in Essays in Criticism, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, The Mark Twain Annual, American Literary History, Scholarly Editing, and in several edited collections.