This comprehensive Handbook of Melville aims to reintroduce readers to a writer whom they think they know well by re-examining his entire corpus--the novels, short prose, and poetry--in light of the diversity and vibrancy of global Melville studies.

Chapter 1: Jennifer Greiman and Michael Jonik: Introduction: Melville's Third Century Part I. Critical and Textual Histories Chapter 2: Adam Fales and Jordan Alexander Stein: "Copyright, 1892, by Elizabeth S. Melville": Rethinking the Field Formation of Melville Studies Chapter 3: Stuart Burrows: "For Ever Slides Away": Melville and Critical Theory Chapter 4: Michael Jonik: Clarel the Saracen: Historical Romance, Islam, and the Medieval Chapter 5: Andrew Hadfield: Melville and English Renaissance Writing Chapter 6: Samuel Otter: Constructing Timoleon Etc. and "The Great Pyramid" Part II. Sexualities and Genders Chapter 7: Rodrigo Andrés: Comings out: Non-Normative Domesticities in "The Apple-Tree Table" Chapter 8: Édouard Marsoin: "Capabilities of Enjoyment": Melville's Use of Pleasure Chapter 9: Shirley Samuels: Men at Sea: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Herman Melville Part III. Indigeneities and Colonialisms Chapter 10: Brian Yothers: Comparative Indigeneities/Comparative Colonialisms Across Melville's Career: Queequeg, Hunilla, Ungar, and the Queen of Sheba Chapter 11: Nicholas Spengler: Melville and American Solitude: A Settler-Colonial Poetics Chapter 12: Kiron Ward: Indian-Hating: Ontological Anthropology, Indigenous Knowledges, and The Confidence-Man Part IV. Races and Forms of Racialization Chapter 13: Mary Grace Albanese: "Great Curse that of Babel": Translating Revolution in "Benito Cereno" Chapter 14: James Gerard Noel: Dispensable Labor and Racialization Aboard the Pequod Chapter 15: Lenora Warren: "Becoming" Black in Billy Budd, Sailor Chapter 16: Peter Boxall: A Sort of Crutch: Race and Prosthesis in "Benito Cereno" Part V. Politics and Economics Chapter 17: Cécile Roudeau: "Perplexities of State": Melville, Democracy, Regulation Chapter 18: Stephen W. Sawyer: Veridiction and the Democratic State of Exception in Billy Budd Chapter 19: Paul Downes: Inscrutable Malice: Moby Dick and the Resistance to Capital Chapter 20: Chad M. Luck: The Point of Interest: Economics and Aesthetics in The Confidence-Man Part VI. Geographies and Histories Chapter 21: Alex Calder: Melville's Raft Books: Finding the Way in Mardi and Moby-Dick Chapter 22: Thomas Massnick and Brigitte Fielder: Genealogies, Geographies, and Genres: Placing Isabel, Placing Pierre Chapter 23: Wyn Kelley: "Portuguese Vengeance": Melville's Narrative of Empire and Resistance Chapter 24: Jill Spivey Caddell: Battle-Pieces and the Paratexts of History Part VII. Ecologies and Energies Chapter 25: Melissa Gniadek: Typee and Trees Chapter 26: Peter Riley: Moby-Dick and the Political Ecology of the Stranded Whale Chapter 27: Tom Nurmi: Melville's Foams Chapter 28: Jeffrey Insko: Melville, Energy, and the Anthropocene Part VIII. Aesthetics and Poetics Chapter 29: Cody Marrs: Battle-Pieces and the Problem of Beauty Chapter 30: Katie McGettigan: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetics of Noise Chapter 31: Ronan Ludot-Vlasak: Hermes' Gift: Melville, Classical Antiquity, and the Nonhuman Part IX. Philosophies Chapter 32: Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz: Command in Melville Chapter 33: K. L. Evans: Melville's Ark: Modernity, Reality, and the Great Art of Telling the Truth Chapter 34: Dominic Mastroianni: Emersonian Isabel: On Thinking and Wonder in Pierre Chapter 35: Paul Hurh: Herman Melville's Pessimist Verse: James Thomson and Timoleon, Etc. Chapter 36: Branka Arsi'c: Afterword: Melville, the Sorcerer

Jennifer Greiman is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University. She specializes in 18th- and 19th-century Atlantic literatures, democratic theory, and the work of Herman Melville. Her latest book, Melville's Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form, was published in 2023. She is also the author of Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (2010), co-editor of The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (2013), and Associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. Michael Jonik teaches American literature and critical theory at the University of Sussex. He has published Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge 2018), and writes on pre-1900 American literature, continental philosophy, politics, and the history of science. He has held fellowships at the Cornell Society for the Humanities and the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies, and won research grants from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Reviews and Special Issues editor for the journal Textual Practice.

Includes three dozen new, cutting-edge interventions in Melville Studies and literary criticism Features clusters on indigeneity, ecologies and energies, gender and sexuality Offers new takes on developed critical approaches to questions of literary history, politics, war, economics, aesthetics, and philosophy in Melville's work