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 an illustrated 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''s commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.