Samuel Otter

In fascinating new contextual readings of four of Herman Melville's novels—Typee, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Pierre—Samuel Otter delves into Melville's exorbitant prose to show how he anatomizes ideology, making it palpable and strange. Otter portrays Melville as deeply concerned with issues of race, the body, gender, sentiment, and national identity. He articulates a range of contemporary texts (narratives of travelers, seamen, and slaves; racial and aesthetic treatises; fiction; poetry; and essays) in order to flesh out Melville's discursive world. Otter presents Melville's works as "inside narratives" offering material analyses of consciousness. Chapters center on the tattooed faces in Typee, the flogged bodies in White-Jacket, the scrutinized heads in Moby-Dick, and the desiring eyes and eloquent, constricted hearts of Pierre. Otter shows how Melville's books tell of the epic quest to know the secrets of the human body. Rather than dismiss contemporary beliefs about race, self, and nation, Melville inhabits them, acknowledging their appeal and examining their sway. Meticulously researched and brilliantly argued, this groundbreaking study links Melville's words to his world and presses the relations between discourse and ideology. It will deeply influence all future studies of Melville and his work.

Melville’s Anatomies

A historic and symbolic city on the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was seen as the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible post-slavery future played out. Philadelphia Stories argues that this cosmopolitan setting produced a novel, and enduring, literary tradition in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation. With bold and commanding analyses, Otter delivers a sophisticated argument that establishes Philadelphia as a cornerstone of American literary history.

America's Literature of Race and Freedom

Philadelphia Stories

"What Otter has done better than most contemporary readers of Melville is to bring Melville's obsession with rhetoric and with authorship into alignment with those political issues and to capture fully the context of Melville's concerns."—Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans

Robert S. Levine

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) addressed in their writings a range of issues that continue to resonate in American culture: the reach and limits of democracy; the nature of freedom; the roles of race, gender, and sexuality; and the place of the United States in the world. Yet they are rarely discussed together, perhaps because of their differences in race and social position. Douglass escaped from slavery and tied his well-received nonfiction writing to political activism, becoming a figure of international prominence. Melville was the grandson of Revolutionary War heroes and addressed urgent issues through fiction and poetry, laboring in increasing obscurity. In eighteen original essays, the contributors to this collection explore the convergences and divergences of these two extraordinary literary lives. Developing new perspectives on literature, biography, race, gender, and politics, this volume ultimately raises questions that help rewrite the color line in nineteenth-century studies. Contributors: Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary Hester Blum, The Pennsylvania State University Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison John Ernest, West Virginia University William Gleason, Princeton University Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Carolyn L. Karcher, Washington, D.C. Rodrigo Lazo, University of California, Irvine Maurice S. Lee, Boston University Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland, College Park Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley John Stauffer, Harvard University Sterling Stuckey, University of California, Riverside Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, Irvine Susan M. Ryan, University of Louisville David Van Leer, University of California, Davis Maurice Wallace, Duke University Robert K. Wallace, Northern Kentucky University Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago

Essays in Relation

Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville

In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in religious toleration and representative government and of national Declaration and Constitution, near the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the laboratory for a social experiment with international consequences. Philadelphia would be the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible future for the United States after slavery would be played out. It would be the arena in which various residents would or would not demonstrate their capacities to participate in the nation's civic and political life. Otter argues that the Philadelphia "experiment" (the term used in the nineteenth-century) produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation.

Samuel Otter

Books

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