We approached our book, theme, and recommendations as readers and lovers of Melville’s work who were inspired by following in his footsteps to places “whole oceans away,” as he describes the Pacific in Moby-Dick. Melville traveled widely and kept up his travels throughout a lifetime of further exploration, as well as voluminous writing. We want to share the exhilaration of traveling witha writer: that is, by reading of Melville’s travels, traveling to the places he visited, and also hearing from people who know those places too. We hope our book gives readers contact with the many dimensions of global travel, in whatever form they find for themselves.
This is the first essay collection to consider Melville’s novels from the perspective of people in the Pacific Islands. Whether you have read Moby-Dickor not, Melville’s Polynesian adventures, which he converted into often sensational narratives, take readers to fascinating places. He won avid 19th-century admirers for portrayals of lush tropical scenery, tales of purported cannibalism, tattooing, sex, and violence, and often humorous mishaps. Today’s readers will want to know more, and this volume offers 21st-century perspectives on what Melville gleaned from his travels. Most importantly, what Melville described in Moby-Dickas “an everlasting itch for things remote” led to astounding reflections on the world and its splendid varieties of human nature. This book might accompany journeys around the globe—or simply to the bookstore.
Wilson Heflin’s indispensable but unfinished account of Melville’s life at sea from 1841-45, here lovingly edited by two experts on Melville and maritime life, unearths the full story and factual basis of Melville’s Pacific travels. Drawing from logbooks, consular records, newspaper accounts, and museum archives from around the world, Heflin reveals what Melville knew and fictionalized in his books. Highly readable for novices and scholars alike, this book provides an exciting entrée into early shipboard adventures and dangers and a chronicle of places and people around the globe—many long gone.
Based on more than a half-century of research, this work examines on of the most stimulating period's of Melville's life - the four years he spent aboard whaling vessels in the Pacific during the early 1940s.
In past and present narratives of the Marquesas, along with other Pacific paradises, writers tend toward sensational or romantic exaggeration. T. Walter Herbert sets the record straight, showing what Melville likely encountered during his sojourn to Nukuhiva. In Herbert’s book, Melville is one of three examples of visitors to the islands, along with ship’s captain David Porter, whose narrative describes his laying violent waste to villages in the interior, and missionary William Alexander. Herbert shows what these visitors misunderstood about people characterized as “savages” and “barbarians”—readings that continue to influence cultural attitudes today. No one writes with quite the controlled fury and keen insight of this author!
Sanborn’s is one of the best books for tracing a thought process experienced by Melville, or many a Western traveler in the Pacific trying to make sense of challenging cultural differences. Focusing on the taboo topic of cannibalism, Sanborn breaks down Western anxieties and fears of the unknown, showing how Melville balanced different cultural perspectives against his own experience. The result is a profoundly informative guide to how one may rethink cultural norms and how Melville’s later works reflected on his foundational early experiences and travels.
In The Sign of the Cannibal Geoffrey Sanborn offers a major reassessment of the work of Herman Melville, a definitive history of the post-Enlightenment discourse on cannibalism, and a provocative contribution to postcolonial theory. These investigations not only explore mid-nineteenth century resistance to the colonial enterprise but argue that Melville, using the discourse on cannibalism to critique colonialism, contributed to the production of resistance. Sanborn focuses on the representations of cannibalism in three of Melville's key texts-Typee, Moby-Dick, and "Benito Cereno." Drawing on accounts of Pacific voyages from two centuries and virtually the entire corpus of the post-Enlightenment discourse on…
One might read Melville’s accounts of the Pacific and reckon with only literary sources and contexts for his books. Bercaw Edwards lays bare the sounds of Pacific voices, the oral sources for his work. Drawing on a wealth of popular accounts as well as theories of discourse and linguistics, she identifies three “languages” Melville learned in his Pacific travels: sailor talk, (a rich world of yarns, folklore, and tall tales), “cannibal” talk (both islanders’ stories and the narratives they inspired), and missionary talk (accounts by religious leaders in the islands). Bercaw Edwards brings deep appreciation and unforgettable zest to Melville’s work, showing his remarkable ear and memory for rich varieties of speech and what they convey about cultural encounters.
This book offers an examination of Melville's 'borrowing'.At the age of twenty-one, Herman Melville signed on the whaleship Acushnet as a common seaman and sailed from Massachusetts to the South Pacific. Upon reaching Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and spent a month ashore on this reputed 'cannibal island.' He departed as crew of another whaleship but was put ashore in the heavily missionized Tahitian islands after participating in a bloodless mutiny. Eventually making his way to Hawaii, he joined the crew of the American frigate United States and finally reached Boston in October 1844 after four years…
We have focused our recommendations on Melville’s (and other people’s) takes on Polynesian islands, but Melville also wrote about another crucial Pacific archipelago, the Galápagos Islands. His collection of sketches, “The Encantadas,” explores a very different world from Nukuhiva, Maui, or Tahiti, one nearly empty of human inhabitants, given over to birds, tortoises, iguanas, and insects. Yet here as elsewhere, Melville finds plenty to satisfy his “itch for things remote.” And here as elsewhere he meditates on human nature: the misfits, petty tyrants, and exiles who might find a home in such a forbidding place. If you think of Melville as an entertaining chronicler of the Pacific world, you will find much in that vein here—but also philosophy, history, and a sort of melancholy romance.
Best known as the creator of Captain Ahab and the great white whale of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (1819–91) found critical and popular success with his first novels, which he based on his adventures in the South Seas. His reputation was diminished by his preoccupation with metaphysical themes and allegorical techniques in later works; and by the time of his death, his books were long forgotten. Generations later, Melville's readers recognized his work as keenly satirical and rich in elements that prefigured the emergence of existentialism and Freudian psychology. Melville's critical fortunes temporarily rebounded in the early to mid-1850s, with the…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
