... as a guiding metaphor for Ahab’s transcendental quest. In contrast, Ishmael undermines and levels the monumental force through his connections to his surroundings, a horizontal rather than vertical architecture. Ishmael is also a Romantic in his self-expression, his libera- tion, and his creative...

...&L 52: 343–64) argues that ‘‘St. Paul’s preachments upon resurrection and immortality in 1 Corinthians, evoked in Ishmael by the spoils of the Rose-Bud, hounded Melville for a lifetime, eventually suggesting in late- John Samson 49 blooming roses...

... books in terms of Melville s version of the Romantic reforma- tion of the myth of the Fall. Mardi dramatizes the transition from the Romantic quest for knowledge and self-integration to the Victorian experience of doubt and fragmentation In Moby-Dick Ishmael s quest involves learning to rely only...

..., the more one feels a dark belligerence in his charm”; when he concludes that “it was not so much on Melville’s plots or characters or settings that New York left its mark as in the nerve and sinew of his prose”; or when he describes Ishmael as a “mobile consciousness, extracted from his own...

... criticism, from Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953) to Frank Lentricchia’s Lucchesi and the Whale (AmLS 2001, p. 56) and K. L. Evans’s Whale! (AmLS 2003, pp. 50–51) to see what, in spite of their differences in method or approach...

... and rich thesis, Kelley finds the roots of Melville’s larger interest in intimacy with the other (as with Ishmael and Queequeg) in his Pacific encounters. iv  Moby-Dick Two valuable studies complement each other by analogizing the novel’s form to museums, which were shifting from...

...’’ figure—such as Bartleby, Benito Cer- eno, and Isabel Banford—is an enigmatic isolato who provokes a signifi- cant realization in the spiritual innocent to whom he or she is linked. ‘‘The Sociable Isolato most clearly seen in Ishmael, enjoys the company of others but is simultaneously a lone soul...

... Shelley. In subsequent chapters, Cook applies this interpretive context with great effect, alternating between Ishmael and Ahab, closely follow- ing the narrative progression of the novel and offering cogent readings of many major and minor episodes. Cook’s juxtaposition of biblical paradigms...

... Hawthorne with Dimmesdale and Coverdale, characters who reject male friendship, and Melville with Ishmael and Pierre, one a character who welcomes male bonding and the other who mourns his masculine isolation. On this basis Temple reckons that Hawthorne accepted with “bourgeois complacency...

... alter ego, Ishmael, as an amateur naturalist comparable to John and William Bartram or John James Audubon, Cook persuasively shows how the cetology chapters “mirrored the era’s widespread tendency toward the anthropomorphiz- ing of species, as well as the pervasive influence of natural theology...

... tragic reading of Ahab (see below). Ishmael’s “middlebrow” narration simultaneously asserts cultural authority and invites readers to question it, somewhat like P. T. Barnum’s museum exhibits, Jenny Lind’s con- certs, or Ishmael’s own analysis of the whale’s skeleton in “A Bower in the Arsacides...

... affinities between Ishmael and Pip, such as their survival (short-lived in Pip’s case) despite abandonment at sea, and views Ishmael’s deliverance as paralleling the path of the protagonist of slave narratives published in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly Frederick Douglass’s 1845 narrative...

..., a philosophical position, based on digression, that Melville is developing through Ishmael. In contrast is Ahab’s quest, which represents the impossible attempt to achieve ‘‘philosophic mastery and which Duquette relates to the sys- tematic, institutional philosophies of Kant and Locke...

... white males to the list (John Barth, John Hawkes, and William H. Gass) while removing Ishmael Reed, Grace Paley, Clarence Major, Gerald Vizenor, and others. More balanced is Patell’s approach, which contrasts minor- ity resistances to the mainstream with attempts to escape a sense...

... to the Present Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut.” The contexts in which they worked and the state of literature in their time is especially important to Hoffmann, who respects these contexts and states...

... Fortuny’s American Writers in Istanbul is a wide-ranging study with an opening chapter on Melville, “Ishmael, Urban Naturalist” (pp. 1–29), that offers a thoughtful assessment of the author’s journal record of his experience in the Turkish city, a major stop on his travels to Europe and the Levant...

... Graham s dietetics, which warned that alcohol, fatty foods, and spices could disorder the mind s functioning. The chapter addresses Bartleby, the Scrivener, Moby-Dick, and Pierre. Reading a number of the gustatory scenes in Moby-Dick, including Ishmael and Queequeg s chowder dinner at the Try-Pots...

... that subverts both traditional beliefs and patriarchy), and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (studied with Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber’s Louisiana with a view to how much voodoo/hoodoo practice and belief “have infected and, in the last two novels, overridden African American Christianity...

... both the text and readerly critique. Such generic shifts also prepare us for Ishmael’s alternating role as narrator and character as both he and the reader “transition from engrossed Aristotelian spectator to estranged Brechtian witness.” Laufer reads the quarter-deck chap- ter productively...

... Kelley shows Ishmael’s narra- tive recognizing and overturning these qualities, which Melville would again challenge in ‘‘Benito Cereno Y ukiko Oshima in ‘‘ The Red Flag of the Pequod/Pequot: Native American Presence in Moby-Dick pp. 254– 66 in Melville ‘‘Among the Nations argues that ‘‘ T...