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...
Visionary of the Word brings together the latest scholarship on Herman Melville's treatment of religion across his long career as a writer of fiction and poetry. The volume suggests the broad range of Melville's religious concerns, including his engagement with the denominational divisions of American Christianity, his dialogue with transatlantic currents in nineteenth-century religious thought, his consideration of theological and philosophical questions related to the problem of evil and determinism versus free will, and his representation of the global contact among differing faiths...
Visionary of the Word brings together the latest scholarship on Herman Melville's treatment of religion across his long career as a writer of f...
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 ...