The series title page of Herman Melville in Context asserts it to be the “fullest introduction” available to Melville for “scholars, teachers, students and general readers.” It keeps this promise in part because it is so nicely shaped. Kevin J. Hayes has assembled thirty-four spry and carefully edited eight- to ten-page essays by a remarkable set of Melville scholars. These are bundled into six or seven “parts,” each tackling one area of critical concern: geographical contexts, social contexts, cultural contexts, literary contexts, and the contexts of literary reception. Backmatter provides a “highly selective’ Further Reading section, and, nicely foregrounded before even the Preface, we encounter standard “Notes on Contributors.” While some diversities have been hard to collect – e.g. only nine of thirty-four essays are by women – the volume does bring together scholars at widely varying career stages. At one end, and leading off the section on literary reception, don Hershel Parker guides a tour through Melville's “Make or Break Reviews.” Also collected in the “reception” section we find Rute J. Beirante, a graduate student in Lisbon, whose well-researched “translation” essay not only richly details the cosmopolitan history of Melville in translation, but nicely ends by recognizing contemporary currents of popular and digital dissemination, what she calls the “broader spectrum of divulgation” (335). Typical of the volume's thoughtful design, the geography section begins with Melville's origins in “New York City,” before reaching toward “The Berkshires,” “The American West,” “The Pacific,” “London,” “Europe,” and finally “The Holy Land.” Melville's Latin American contexts are on the rise, and one can imagine Rodrigo Lazo's excellent “Dons and Cholos” piece revised and moved from the “social” to the “geography” section. Were the book made this year that might have happened, which is only to note that no book of this sort is timeless.Footnote ¹

Herman Melville in Context is prohibitively expensive for most readers to buy, but ease of use suggests it should be in every institutional library still buying. It is just simpler with this volume than with any other general Melville source to mine answers to discrete questions. Did Melville go out west? (Lewis 27.) How did he differ from orientalist writers also crossing Pacific beaches? (Calder 35.) In two minutes you can put your finger on the answer. This is because Hayes has carefully kept each contributor first to the task of getting down the basics. But having done so, most spring into provocative new close readings, model ways of reaching through Melville to their respective topics, offer penetrating observations that extend current scholarship, and suggest further lines of inquiry. If discrete readings will deeply challenge and sometimes outstrip the very general reader's capacity to keep pace, a lesser book would have avoided this only occasional problem.

This review can't celebrate every deft foray into Melville's myriad contexts, so with a few peeps inside the volume I will try to witness its care for the art of criticism. Alex Calder's essay “The Pacific” dutifully catalogs Melville's beach crossings, but is most remarkable for its stylistic elegance. Comparing two of Melville's literary excursions, Calder writes, “It would be difficult to propose two more radically different Pacific fictions than Melville's ostentatiously baggy romance, Mardi, and the dense dark star of ‘Benito Cereno.’ Yet both are globally imagined works” (40). In his queer-theory-infused piece “Men and Women and Men,” the first on Melville's social contexts, David Greven surprises in his reading of how “the deep fear of effeminacy … cours[ing] through Victorian American culture” becomes incapsulated in “the image of Pierre as a worm.” While the image of Pierre as a silkworm “corresponds to the image of [Pierre's mother] as a slithering snake,” Greven writes, it “also establishes the male artist as defenseless, stalked by his predatory mother. Moreover, it envisions her as phallic, him as soft, malleable, gooey” (82). My point is that these smart essays are often a pleasure to read.

Herman Melville in Context will “stay news” because its art overflows its own formal obligations in ways that never commandeer its use-value. I now reach for this book before others both to quick-check details of time, place, politics, and culture, and also to critically engage with ideas in it. This collection captures the state of the field and points our way to the future. All astir advancing Melville studies as one bright facet of American studies should see this book shelved in the electronic or actual stacks of their respective institutions.