It is one of the reasons that we return to him, especially those readers for whom the horrors of the contemporary American moment—labor denigrated and wealth sanctified, black life held cheap, falsehood everywhere wearing “the robes of Senators and Judges,” as Moby-Dick put it—occasion, along with the habitual grief, a kind of thwarted fury. At these impasses, where speech seems at once urgent and purposeless, Melville’s fiction can be enabling—as it certainly was for Ralph Ellison in the composition of Invisible Man or C. L. R. James in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways or Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet, to name only a few radical undertakings heartened by his example. Herman Melville is an acute historian of our predicaments, and he made of their explication works of fantastic power and outrageous beauty. He is also, centuries on, a resource.

PETER COVIELLO

WORKS CITED

Arsic, Branka. Passive Constitutions, or, 7½ Times Bartleby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Blum, Hester. “Melville and Oceanic Studies.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine, 22–36. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. Reprints. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Elmer, Jonathan. “‘Bartleby,’ Empson, and Pastoral Pleasures.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2 no. 1 (2014): 24–33.

James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. 1953. Reprints. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.

Sanborn, Geoffrey. “Melville and the Nonhuman World.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, 10–21.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Thompson, Graham. “‘Bartleby’ and the Magazine Fiction.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, 99–112.

Suggestions for Further Reading

This is a very abridged list of scholarly works that, in addition to the writing cited above, may be of use to the new student of Melville’s short fiction.