Melville’s Other Lives
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"negroes"
A01=Christopher Sten
Author_Christopher Sten
Bartleby the Scrivener
Benito Cereno
Benjamin Franklin
bodily pain
bodily trials
capitalist economy
career turning point
Category=DSB
Category=DSRC
confession
confidence man
Cosmopolitan
cultural materialism
cultural values
deformation
distrust
docile bodies
embodiment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fantastic narrative
fragments
Galapagos Islands
Herman Melville's short stories
human body
hybrid
imagined journey
incommunicable pain
inferior intelligence
invalidism
lightning science
materialism
monster
monster theory
otherness
others
pain
parable
performance
performance artist
persona
perspective
race
racism
realism
salesman
shock of recognition
sickroom
Sketch
slave rebellion
soul
The Bell-Tower
The Encantadas
The Lightning-Rod Man
the other
trauma
Product details
- ISBN 9780813945439
- Weight: 151g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 19 Jul 2022
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Melville’s Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza Tales—Herman Melville’s only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime—and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville’s stories. As Christopher Sten shows, all of the stories in The Piazza Tales present encounters between established white male figures: a writer, a lawyer, a ship captain, a homeowner, an architect, a world traveler, and characters who are outsiders, minorities, outcasts, or "others": a seamstress, an office drudge, enslaved Africans, a traveling salesman, island castaways, the poor. In each, Melville concentrates on the trials of the human body, its pain and trauma, its struggles and frustrations. Some tales concern common trials such as illness or invalidism ("The Piazza"), the tedium of office work ("Bartleby"), or the aggravation of door-to-door salesmen ("The Lightning-Rod Man"). Others concern extraordinary trials: the traumatic violence of a rebellion on a slave ship ("Benito Cereno"), the hardships of surviving on a wasteland archipelago ("The Encantadas"), the perils of creating a monstrous "man-machine" ("The Bell-Tower"). In their concern for the cultural meanings of such trials, Melville’s stories look forward to the work of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and other cultural materialists who have shown how cultures define, control, and oppress bodies based on their otherness. As a storyteller, Melville understood how such cultural dynamics operate and seized on our collective obsession with the human body as subject, symbol, and vehicle to dramatize his tales.
Christopher Sten is Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at George Washington University and coeditor of "This Mighty Convulsion": Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War.
