The long-awaited companion volume to Gail Coffler's first book, Melville's Classical Allusions, has finally arrived. In this new volume, thousands of references to Judeo-Christian and other religions in Herman Melville's books are references. The index includes references to all of his novels, short stories, poetry, lectures, letters, and journals. With it, one can trace a given allusion through the entire canon, or research any individual work, such as Moby Dick, Billy Budd, or Benito Cereno from beginning to end. Readers interested in Melville's writing and philosophy as well as researchers of 19th century literature, culture, and religion will appreciate this book. This volume begins with a master index that lists all religious allusions and their location throughout Melville's works. Next, there is an alphabetical index and a sequential index of all allusions in each of the individual volumes. The sequential index lists allusions in their chronological page order and identifies many bible passages alluded to or quoted by Melville, citing the bible book, chapter, and verse. A supplementary index alphabetically lists the allusions in Melville's Correspondence and Journals. The book concludes with a glossary briefly explaining all allusions and gives cross references to related entries.

Yothers’ Sacred Uncertainty examines Melville’s engagement with religious difference, both within American culture and around the world. It is impossible to understand Melville’s wider engagement with religious and cultural questions, however, without understanding the fundamental tension between self and society, self and others that underlies his work, and that is manifested in particular in the way in which he interacts with other writers. There is almost certainly no more concrete or reliable way to get at Melville’s affirmations of and arguments with these interlocutors than in the markings and annotations that appear in his copies of many of their works, so Yothers examines Melville’s marginalia for clues to Melville’s thinking about self, other, and difference. Sacred Uncertainty provides a much needed exploration of Melville’s encounter with and reflection upon religious difference.

Many writers in antebellum America sought to reinvent the Bible, but no one, Ilana Pardes argues, was as insistent as Melville on redefining biblical exegesis while doing so. In Moby-Dick he not only ventured to fashion a grand new inverted Bible in which biblical rebels and outcasts assume center stage, but also aspired to comment on every imaginable mode of biblical interpretation, calling for a radical reconsideration of the politics of biblical reception. In Melville's Bibles, Pardes traces Melville's response to a whole array of nineteenth-century exegetical writings—literary scriptures, biblical scholarship, Holy Land travel narratives, political sermons, and women's bibles. She shows how Melville raised with unparalleled verve the question of what counts as Bible and what counts as interpretation.

For more than a century readers have found Herman Melville’s writing rich with philosophical ideas, yet there has been relatively little written about what, exactly, is philosophically significant about his work and why philosophers are so attracted to Melville in particular. This volume addresses this silence through a series of essays that: (1) examine various philosophical contexts for Melville’s work, (2) take seriously Melville’s writings as philosophy, and (3) consider how modern philosophers have used Melville and the implications of appropriating Melville for contemporary thought. Melville among the Philosophers is ultimately an intervention across literary studies and philosophy that carves new paths into the work of one of America’s most celebrated authors, a man who continues to enchant and challenge readers well into the twenty-first century.

A detailed synopsis guides the reader through the musical and dramatic action of the opera, Billy Budd.

Clarel, an 18,000-line poem, is one of the longest examples of the faith-doubt genre that arose in Victorian times and one that has largely been neglected by Melville critics. Author William Potter argues that Melville's poem Clarel is instead a study in comparative religion - one that explores faith in the post-Darwinian age. It was written at a crossroads point in Western thought, when science, technology, nationalism, and imperialism were reshaping the world and in the process ushered in the modern age. Potter claims the poem argues that science may have altered our perception of the world, but it cannot eradicate the basic human need for faith, which is timeless and which therefore encompasses far more than the concerns of Western Christianity. In Melville's Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds, Potter examines the poem within this historical context and by so doing attempts to solve some of the issues that critics have asserted the poem presents. He reviews the burgeoning field of comparative religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes discussions of many of the theories and ideas of well-known figures of the time such as Hegel, Hume, Muller, Emerson, Wh

Melville's allusions to works of art embellish his poems and novels. In this study, his use of the art analogy as a literary technique is traced, along with the influence of his predecessors and comtemporaries and how his sense of form was instructed by design in works of art.

Over 15 years in the making, an unprecedented one-volume reference work. Many of today's students and teachers of literature, lacking a familiarity with the Bible, are largely ignorant of how Biblical tradition has influenced and infused English literature through the centuries. An invaluable research tool. Contains nearly 800 encyclopedic articles written by a distinguished international roster of 190 contributors. Three detailed annotated bibliographies. Cross-references throughout.

Despite the ever-expanding body of Deleuzian scholarship, single volume has explored the religious dimensions of Delueze's writing. Now, Mary Bryden has assembled a team of international scholars to do just that. Their essays illustrate the ways in which Deleuzian thought is antithetical to religious debate, as well as the ways in which it contributes to those debates. This volume will be invaluable for researchers, teachers and students of theology, philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies and literary criticism as well as to students of French who read Deleuze's work in its original language.

"This book explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Melville's work is an example of how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by contemporary theology. Damien Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical scepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace the acumen of modern analytical techniques such as higher biblical criticism, while salvaging simultaneously the spiritual authority of biblical language. Wisdom for Melville constitutes both object and analytical framework in this balancing act. Melville's Wisdom joins other works of postsecular literary studies in challenging its own discipline's constitutive secularization narrative by rethinking modern, putatively secular cultural formations in terms of their reciprocity with religious concepts and texts. Schlarb foregrounds Melville's sustained, career-spanning concern with biblical wisdom, its formal properties, and its knowledge-creating potential. By excavating this project from Melville's oeuvre, Melville's Wisdom shows how he seeks to avoid the spiritually corrosive effects of suspicious reading while celebrating truth-seeking over subversive iniquity"--