In Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville s abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville s creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work. Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the...
In Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville s abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of...
This valuable new addition to Melville studies offers a ground-breaking interpretation of Melville's last published novel, one of the most complex texts in American literature and a work that has long been noted for the divergent critical views it has elicited. Reading the novel as a generic hybrid of narrative satire and apolyptic vision, Cook situates the novel in its implicit theological, historical, and biographical contexts: he examines the novel's relation to Melville's heterodox ideas of the deity, to the increasingly commercialized cultural milieu of antebellum America, and to...
This valuable new addition to Melville studies offers a ground-breaking interpretation of Melville's last published novel, one of the most complex ...
