reading lists

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

mobydick.jpg

A reading list of books and articles that illuminate Melville’s epic novel. The themes and headings here are based on the lecture topics of my 2020 course on the novel at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge.

 

General/introductory

  • Philbrick, Nathaniel, Why Read Moby-Dick? (Penguin, 2011)

  • Delbanco, Andrew, Melville: His World and Work (Picador, 2005)

  • Olson, Charles, Call Me Ishmael (Jonathan Cape, 1967)

  • Hoare, Philip, Leviathan, Or The Whale (4th Estate, 2008)

  • Hayes, Kevin J., The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

  • Bloom, Harold, (ed.) Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) (Infobase, 2007)

Further biographical context

  • Argersinger, Jana L., and Leland S. Person, (eds.) Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship. (University of Georgia Press, 2008).

  • Cook, Jonathan, ‘London,’ in Kevin. Hayes (ed.), Herman Melville in Context, (Cambridge University Press, 2018) pp. 45-54

  • Martin, Robert K, and Leland S Person “The Hawthorne-Melville Relationship.”
    ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 46.1–2 (2000): 1–122.

 Masculinity and queerness

  • Martin, Robert K, Hero, Captain and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (University of California Press, 1986)

  • Martin, Robert K., ‘Melville and Sexuality’ in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. by Robert S. Levine (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 186–201

Race and slavery

  • Bernard, Fred V., ‘The Question of Race in Moby-Dick’ The Massachusetts Review, vol. 43, no. 3, 2002, pp. 384–404.

  • Bradley, David, ‘Our Crowd, Their Crowd: Race, Reader, and Moby-Dick’ in Bryant, J. & Wilder, R., Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays (Kent State University Press, 1997), pp. 119-146

  • Fanning, Susan Garbarini, ‘“Kings of the Upside-Down World”: Challenging White Hegemony in Moby-Dick’ in Bryant, J., Edwards, M. K. B., & Marr, T. (eds.). Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick. (Kent State University Press, 2014)

  • Foster, Charles H., ‘Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick,’ The New England Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, March 1961, pp. 3-35

  • Freeburg, Christopher, ‘Pip and the Sounds of Blackness in Moby-Dick,’ in The New Melville Studies, ed. by Cody Marrs (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 42–52

  • Freeburg, Christopher, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

  • Heimart, Alan, ‘Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism’, American Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1963), pp. 498-534

  • James, C.L.R., Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in (University Press of New England, 2001)

  • Karcher, Carolyn, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville’s America (Louisiana State University Press, 1980)

  • Morrison, Toni, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1988. Available at: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf

  • Pellar, Brian R., Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory (Palgrave, 2017)

  • Rogin, Michael Paul, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Knopf: 1983)

  • Stuckey, Sterling, African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Philosophy and religion

  • Cook, Jonathan, Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of Moby-Dick (Cornell University Press, 2012)

  • Herbert Jr, T. Walter, Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled, (Rutgers University Press, 1977)

  • Herman, Daniel, Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick (Lehigh University Press, 2014)

  • McCall, Corey and Tom Nurmi (eds.), Melville among the Philosophers (Lexington Books, 2017)

  • Sheldon, Leslie A., ‘Messianic Power and Satanic Decay: Milton in Moby-Dick,’ Leviathan, Volume 4, Issue 1-2, (March 2002) pp. 29-50

  • Thompson, Lawrence, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton University Press, 1952)

  • Wood, James, ‘The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville’, in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Jonathan Cape, 1999), pp. 29-47

  • Yothers, Brian, ‘Melville after Secularism’ in C. Marrs (ed.), The New Melville Studies. (Cambridge University Press, 2019) pp. 53-65