Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career - Softcover

Yothers, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081013179X ISBN 13: 9780810131798

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Herman Melville’s oeuvre sustains a fundamental tension among self, society, and others. Sacred Uncertainty explores religious difference that arises from these many voices, both within American culture and around the world. Melville’s work is notably shot through with allusions to other writers and thinkers, whom he regarded as his truest interlocutors—the figures of genius from whom he received, as he eloquently stated it in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” a “shock of recognition.” 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, others, and difference. His interrogations yield a richer understanding of one of the more vexing aspects of the great American novelist’s work.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Yothers is a professor of English at the University of Texas, El Paso, USA. He is the author of Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticismand America’s Most Elusive Author and The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876. Yothers is the associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, a coeditor of the travel section of the Melville Electronic Library, an associate editor for Melville’s Marginalia Online, a coeditor of the interdisciplinary journal Journeys, and an editor for the book series Literary Criticism in Perspective.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081013179X
• ISBN 13: 9780810131798
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364