An entirely fresh approach to Moby Dick, by way of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The aim of this thoroughly unconventional work is to demonstrate that Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations share the same projects and are, in effect, one and the same book. Confounding and improbable as such an enterprise might seem, Whale! not only successfully reveals the vital intersections between Melville and Wittgenstein but also, more important, makes a compelling argument for why such intersections are essential to understanding common political projects in literature...

Melville's Philosophies departs from a long tradition of critical assessments of Melville that dismissed his philosophical capacities as ingenious but muddled. Its contributors do not apply philosophy to Melville in order to detect just how much of it he knew or understood. To the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves-often very strange and quite radical-that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. What emerges is a Melville who is materialistically oriented in a radical way, a Melville who thinks about life forms not just in the context of...

In One Foot in the Finite, K. L. Evans makes the case that Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick offers a chance to rethink literary realism. Distinguishing between realism as an attempt to hold up a mirror to the natural world and the more nuanced realism associated with the work of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Melville, Proust, Woolf, and Joyce, Evans suggests that even narratives like Moby-Dick that are highly stylized or include fantastical elements can depict life as it is actually lived and experienced by real people.

This spirited contribution to materialist...

In One Foot in the Finite, K. L. Evans makes the case that Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick offers a chance to rethink literary realism. Distinguishing between realism as an attempt to hold up a mirror to the natural world and the more nuanced realism associated with the work of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Melville, Proust, Woolf, and Joyce, Evans suggests that even narratives like Moby-Dick that are highly stylized or include fantastical elements can depict life as it is actually lived and experienced by real people.

This spirited contribution to materialist...