Hawthorne and Melville

by Argersinger, Jana L.; Person, Leland S.

• ISBN13: 9780820327518
• ISBN10: 0820327514
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-15
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers.Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers' relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that "looms like a grand hooded phantom" over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne's onMoby-DickandPierreand Melville's onThe Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville's search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville's times.Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.

Author Biography

Jana L. Argersinger is a coeditor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism and serves as president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Leland S. Person is a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Hawthorne and Melville: Writing, Relationship, and Missing Letters	p. 1
Toward the Biographical
Mr. Omoo and the Hawthornes: The Biographical Background	p. 27
Hawthorne and Melville; or, The Ambiguities	p. 51
"The Ugly Socrates": Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience	p. 71
"Ineffable Socialities": Melville, Hawthorne, and Masculine Ambivalence in the Antebellum Marketplace	p. 113
Italy, the Civil War, and the Politics of Friendship	p. 133
Letters on Foolscap	p. 155
Toward the Literary
Hawthorne and Melville in the Shoals: "Agatha," the Trials of Authorship, and the Dream of Collaboration	p. 173
"Shanties of Chapters and Essays": Rewriting Moby-Dick	p. 197
Genealogical Fictions: Race in The House of the Seven Gables and Pierre	p. 227
In the Whale's Wake: Melville and The Blithedale Romance	p. 249
"In Old Rome's Pantheon": Hawthorne, Melville, and the Two Republics	p. 269
Hawthorne, Melville, and the Spirits	p. 297
Alienated Affections: Hawthorne and Melville's Trans-intimate Relationship	p. 321
Works Cited	p. 345
Contributors	p. 367
Index	p. 371
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