A Historical Guide To Herman Melville

This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, anillustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville'scommanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.

Giles Gunn is Professor of English and of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.