Melville’s (Dis)Orders

Melville’s (Dis)Orders offers a dialogical re-reading of Herman Melville as a thinker of moral, political, and existential disorder, tracing how his literary imagination confronts authority, law, violence, and ethical responsibility in modernity.

Combining literary analysis with philosophical reflection, this book advances a dual-voiced, dialogical approach to Melville’s oeuvre that brings literary studies into sustained conversation with ethics, political thought, theology, and intellectual history. Moving beyond thematic interpretation, the authors read Melville as a diagnostician of modernity’s fractures—where sovereignty falters, legal order destabilizes, and moral judgment becomes precarious. Through close readings of major and lesser-known texts, the volume offers scholars a conceptually rigorous framework for understanding Melville’s relevance to debates on authority, responsibility, friendship, and post-theological ethics, while modeling dialogic scholarship as a critical method.

This book is written primarily for scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, Melville studies, American Romanticism, and comparative literature, as well as philosophers, intellectual historians, and scholars of religion interested in ethics, secularization, and dialogic thought. It will also be of value to postgraduate and doctoral students, advanced undergraduates in specialized seminars, and educators seeking an interdisciplinary, research-driven resource on Melville’s ethical imagination.

Paweł Jędrzejko is Associate Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, and a faculty member in the PhD Programme in Studies in English Literatures, Language, and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome. His research spans nineteenth-century American literature, literary and cultural theory, comparative studies, and translation philosophy, with particular emphasis on Herman Melville, dialogic ethics, and the philosophy of friendship. He is the author of the first monographs on Herman Melville published in Polish and has co-edited numerous international volumes and journal issues devoted to American literature and cultural theory. He is a co-author of Atmospheric Health, Nature, and Well-being: Towards a Philosophy of the Garden (Routledge, 2025). He served as President of the International American Studies Association (2021–2023), is Co-Founder and Co–Editor-in-Chief of the Review of International American Studies, and has held ministerial and international advisory appointments in higher education policy, open access, and academic governance.

John Matteson is Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He holds an A.B. in history from Princeton University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. His scholarship focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, intellectual history, and the intersections of literary, moral, and legal thought. He is the author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, which received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and The Lives of Margaret Fuller, awarded the 2012 Ann M. Sperber Prize for Best Biography of a Journalist, as well as A Worse Place than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation (2021). He has published widely in leading journals, including Leviathan, New England Quarterly, and Harvard Theological Review, and is a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.