Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York

Description

Melville's City argues that Melville's relationship to the city was considerably more complex than has generally been believed. By placing him in the historical and cultural context of nineteenth-century New York, Kelley presents a Melville who borrowed from the colourful cultural variety of the city while at the same time investigating its darker and more dangerous social aspects. She shows that images both from Melville and from popular sources of the time represented New York variously as Capital, Labyrinth, City of Man and City of God and she goes on the demonstrate that he resisted a generalising or totalising representation of the city by revealing its hybrid identity and giving voice to the poor, the displaced and the racially excluded. Through close examination of works spanning Melville's career, Kelley forges an analysis of connections between urban and literary form.

"Highly recommended for all collections." Choice "These readings make an argument for the importance of urban forms to Melville's career, proving that Melville entertains a multiplicity of urban forms and perspectives and helping us to understand his place within antebellum American life." John Evelev, American Literature "The growing body of criticism on literature and the city is notably enriched by the publication of this book, which reconsiders Herman Melville's oeuvre in light of its relationship to urban expansion in nineteenth-century America. Kelley's orginality lies in the categories she identifies that freshly illuminate the urban contexts of Melville's fiction." David S. Reynolds, 19th Century Literature "...Melville's City is a rich...addition to the growing literature on the role of the urban in nineteenth-century writing." Haskell Springer, American Studies "Ultimately, Kelley's text is an astute analysis of an important field of Melville scholarship. It is clearly a well-researched book--Kelley has studied (and apllied) Melville criticism in great depth. One comes away from Melville's City with a good sense of Melville's complex relationship with New York....Kelley's work highlights the oftentimes glossed-over relationship Melville had with that vast world away from the sea--the city." American Studies International