An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.

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 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...

Yothers "Sacred Uncertainty" examines Melville s engagement with religious difference, both within American culture and around the world. It is impossible to understand Melville s wider engagement with religious and cultural questions, however, without understanding the fundamental tension between self and society, self and others that underlies his work, and that is manifested in particular in the way in which he interacts with other writers. There is almost certainly no more concrete or reliable way to get at Melville s affirmations of and arguments with these interlocutors than in the...

Yothers "Sacred Uncertainty" examines Melville s engagement with religious difference, both within American culture and around the world. It is impossible to understand Melville s wider engagement with religious and cultural questions, however, without understanding the fundamental tension between self and society, self and others that underlies his work, and that is manifested in particular in the way in which he interacts with other writers. There is almost certainly no more concrete or reliable way to get at Melville s affirmations of and arguments with these interlocutors than in the...

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass represent a crucial strand in nineteenth-century American literature: the struggle for the abolition of slavery. Yet there has been no thoroughgoing discussion of the critical reception of these two giants of abolitionist literature. Reading Abolition narrates and explores the parallels between Stowe's critical reception and Douglass's. The book begins with Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, considering its initial celebration as a work of genius and conscience, its subsequent dismissal in the early twentieth century as anti-Southern and in the...