Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of IndividualismPrinceton University Press, 1989 - 250 pages Wai Chee Dimock approaches Herman Melville not as a timeless genius, but as a historical figure caught in the politics of an imperial nation and an "imperial self." She challenges our customary view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty." |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Ahab Ahab's allegory American antebellum antebellum America attributes authorship barbaric become C. B. Macpherson C. S. Lewis calls chapter characters confidence Confidence-Man constitutive context course discussion doom dramatizes economy Emerson empire for liberty expansionist fact fate fictive figure future Glendinning Herman Melville human identity imperial Indian Indian-hater individual instance invoked Isabel jacket Jacksonian Jarl Jarl's John kinship labor legible less literary Lucy man-child Manifest Destiny Mardi meaning Melville Melville's metaphor Moby-Dick narrative narrator nation Newberry Library nineteenth-century Omoo once personified Pierre Pierre's polarity produces promising proprietary reader Redburn Redburn and White-Jacket reform relation rhetoric Richard Brodhead Robert Rantoul Samoa savage seems self's selfhood sense signifying snake social sovereignty spatial speak Starbuck story suggests tautology temporal textual thing tion turns University Press vengeance victim ville's whale White-Jacket William Ellery Channing words York