Given Herman Melville’s towering status in American literary and cultural history, it seems rather odd to ponder his ‘value’: his reputation and elevated position in the cultural canon are sufficient to over-awe the reader and convince them that his works must be what is casually referred to as ‘great literature’. Continue reading
The eleventh international Melville Society conference was a leviathan of an event, demonstrated by its need for two reviews. Spanning four days, it offered an intensive and diverse range of panels, seminars and activities, which allowed the participants to engage actively with an impressive range of various aspects of current Melvillean scholarship. Continue reading
Organised around the focus of ‘Melville’s crossings’, the event covered the breadth and depth of Melville studies and paid close attention to Melville’s dialogues with philosophy and aesthetic theory, his own travels across the globe, and the idea of borders and thresholds within his works. Echoing these crossings, the event itself traversed the boundary between the academic and the public, including panels, seminars, and plenaries but also public engagement in the form of an afternoon at the British Library. Continue reading