Description
Book SynopsisReexamines Melville's monumental novel and turns the occasion into a meditation on the history and implications of canon formation. This book presents a view of the development of literary history in the United States, and a devastating critique of the genealogy of ideology in the American cultural establishment.
Trade Review"
The Errant Art of Moby-Dick retrieves for all of us the errant art of critical reading, which no mere program of cynical professionalism or fashionable ‘new historicism’ could ever successfully practice in any genuine sense. As such, this work is a major intervention in Melville studies, American literature studies, and the culture of criticism generally."—Daniel O’Hara, Temple University
"An exciting and important work, one that is a major contribution to Melville studies and to American cultural history. It is an eloquent and impassioned defense of theory in the face of a militant resistance to it both by traditional humanist critics and by certain New Historicists."—Edgar A. Dryden, University of Arizona
