In The Sign of the Cannibal Geoffrey Sanborn offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. These investigations not only explore mid nineteenth century resistance to the colonial enterprise but argue that Melville, using the discourse on cannibalism to critique colonialism, contributed to the production of resistance.
Sanborn focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville s key texts Typee, Moby-Dick, and...

In The Sign of the Cannibal Geoffrey Sanborn offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. These investigations not only explore mid nineteenth century resistance to the colonial enterprise but argue that Melville, using the discourse on cannibalism to critique colonialism, contributed to the production of resistance.
Sanborn focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville s key texts Typee, Moby-Dick, and...

The classic adventures of one of American literature's most beloved characters from Mark Twain, one of America's best-loved writers.

Here is a lighthearted excursion into boyhood, a nostalgic return into the simple, rural Missouri world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, and Aunt Polly. It is a universal world of attending school and playing hooky, pranks and punishments, villains and desperate adventure, seen through the eyes of a boy who might be the young Mark Twain himself.

There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer--even in the darkest moments, affection...

In this original study, Geoffrey Sanborn presents a fresh interpretation of the villanous Magua in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and of the dignified harpooner Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Through careful historical research, Sanborn has determined that both authors relied heavily on contemporary accounts of the indigenous natives of New Zealand, the Maori, to develop their iconic characters. Cooper drew heavily on the account of Te Aara in John Liddiard Nicholas's Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand (1817) while Melville studied the personal...

This groundbreaking collection of essays represents Herman Melville as an artist for whom questions of sensation, pleasure, and form cannot be separated from philosophical and political concerns. Contributors offer original and provocative readings that span Melville's career and engage the resurgence of interest among literary scholars in aesthetics. The first of its kind, this collection returns us to the particularities of Melville's extraordinarily varied works and transforms the subject of aesthetics into an invigorating and unpredictable source of interpretive energy.

In an original and provocative series of readings that range across Melville's career, the contributors consider not only the sources and implications of Melville's aesthetics, but the relationship between aesthetic criticism, historical analysis, and contemporary theory.