... and says, ‘‘but of course it is Ahab’s tale; Ahab’s and Moby Dick’s gladiatorial, hand-to-hand battle, a heathenish defiance. Ahab: nothing to stand with him in our literature, before or after However, Hardwick also confesses that reading Mardi, Pierre, and Clarel is ‘‘a task’’ she passed over...

... a symbolic eschatology Boudreau first discusses these themes in Moby-Dick, finding in Ishmael and Ahab two strands: Ahab strikes out at Pauline Christianity while Ishmael is resurrected in the end. Boudreau sees Melville’s fiction after Pierre as dominated by rocks, stones, and walls, ‘‘so his writing...

... as an example of how the text of Moby-Dick crosses genres and mediums as it is reinterpreted by new generations of readers. Edward Sudgeon’s “An Oceanic Modernity: Matthew Fontaine Maury, Ahab, and the White Whale” (Leviathan 16, ii: 23–37) takes a more historically grounded approach to temporality...

...—and where love in perpetuity is more properly the domain of pulpy fancy than solid reality Organizing her study around character types, Cahir discusses Ahab, Pierre, and others as ‘‘the Devil’s children who carry Emersonian self-reliance to the point of destruc- tion. ‘‘The Mysterious Stranger...

..., ‘‘Melville abandons the dream of sublimity for the entropic structures’’ of his subsequent fiction. Leslie E. Sheldon in ‘‘Messianic Power and Satanic Decay: Milton in Moby-Dick’’ (Leviathan 4, i–ii: 29–50) seeks to qualify the reading of Ahab as a version of the Romantics’ heroic Satan by focusing...

... of people, terms, titles, and so on, along with a chronology, a genealogy, and a ‘‘Categorical Index Part reference work, part biography, part literary analysis, part cultural criticism is Clare L. Spark’s huge Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent State...

... on limited knowledge, while Ahab s re- bellion is seen in the context of Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. Milder considers Pierre to be Melville s deconstruction of the Ahabian element in himself, performed with a self-lacerating irony while Clarel is Melville s immersion in history to create a viable...

... as forum, a “cultural interregnum” the novel fills with the conflict between Ahab’s desire for control and the chaotic world of the voyage. Harrison ascribes Melville’s interest in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum to his penchant for cultural democracy, which Barnum’s outlandish exhibits...

... of composition, after Melville had already finished most of the narrative. iv  Moby-Dick Tomoyuki Zettsu, “Captain Ahab’s Cabin: Melville’s Southern Connec- tions in Moby-Dick,” pp. 39–55 in Melville and the Wall of the Modern Age, offers an arresting examination of Melville’s response to the senti...

... relies heavily on lengthy quotations and extended textual analyses, most of which simply reorient standard readings (Delano’s moral and ideological blindness, for example) to apply to America’s contemporary political scene, a bit like critics who see Ahab’s fate as proof of Melville’s...

... crew under the authority of Ahab. For James, the violence the state directed against him was of a piece with the “interpretive violence” that Americanist critics had consistently directed against the crew by writing them out of “the frame narrative for which Ishmael’s liberal values had served...

... somewhat less positively, presenting it as a tragedy grounded in the central paradox that “democratic aspirations are inherently entangled in the risk of domination.” Identifying Ahab as the central protagonist, Shulman contends that Ahab’s “monomania” is both a species of madness and “a valid...

... and mythical origins of Ahab’s quest and the epic grandeur of his character,” Cook returns readers to the centrality of “the problem of natural and moral evil.” His leading assumption is that the Bible becomes a central influence on Moby-Dick and that Melville made use of specific books—most notably...

...-obsessed boyfriend, JD, who vaguely mirror the roles of Ishmael and Ahab in an apocalyptic high school melodrama. Laist offers an astute reading of the movie’s parallels with (and departures from) the novel and argues that the movie suggests how Moby-Dick might have ended if produced by Hollywood...

... opposition of high and low culture. Ahab, according to Evelev, models a middle-class version of Shakespeare that blends the democratic and hierarchical (as in his relations with Pip) and thus anticipates contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare in our mass media, a view at odds with Robert Milder’s...

... Ahab desires. Even Ishmael tries to impose unity through his masthead reveries and his experiments in cetology and phrenology (when he reads the whale’s forehead), and the novel’s ending seems to support a unified worldview because only one person survives. Finally, however, Harris believes...

... in Moby-Dick (Criticism 62: 599 623) reconsiders Ahab as not merely an individualistic man but more specifically a lonely one. Furui aims to analyze the loneliness that lurks beneath his public persona of staunch solitude. Drawing on affect theory and recent studies on emotion in American literature...

...” apparent in such scenes as the shark massacre and the Grand Armada and in such characters as Ahab, who is part man and part whalebone, and the three harpooners, whose savagery is displaced onto the White Whale so they can remain compliant workers in the American industrial machine. Armstrong’s...

... and criticism, Fales and Stein contend that Melville s career could not have been the same without his wife and, more boldly, that there would be no Melville studies without [her] contributions. iv Moby-Dick One volume may be said to dominate the year s responses to Melville s whale: Richard J. King s Ahab s...

... not) nor violent rebellion (Ahab, the various versions of John Brown or Nat Turner) has done the trick. Even at its best, sympathy stops with feeling good about the self while ignoring the other’s difference, and even in a just cause, vio- lence engenders evil and guilt. Russell Banks’s latter-day...