Dawn Coleman

Mahomet's Gospel and Other Revelations: Discovering Melville's Hand in The Works of William E. Channing

This essay announces the discovery of Herman Melville’s erased annotation in Elizabeth Shaw Melville’s copy of the six-volume Works of William E. Channing, as well as the presence of hundreds of unattributed markings in this set, some of which may be in Herman’s hand. It describes the collaborative process of recovering the four-line erased annotation, in which Melville challenges Channing’s argument in “The Evidences of Revealed Religion” that Jesus’s obscure origins, followed by his unlikely success at founding a world religion, point to his divine mission; Melville queries whether one might make the same point about “Mahomet,” who after age 40 began to preach his “Gospel.” This essay argues that Melville’s perception of Muhammad’s obscure background, unsupported by the biographical information in previously identified sources for his knowledge of Muhammad, is traceable to his 1849 reading of the entry on “Mahomet” in Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, presented here as a new source for his understanding of Islam. Melville may have erased this annotation himself after reading in 1850 Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes (1841) or Washington Irving’s Mahomet and His Successors (1850), both of which emphasize Muhammad’s high rank and early advantages. This possible self-editing invites scholars to rethink erasures and excisions elsewhere in Melville’s library.

The Melville-Hawthorne Connection: A Study of the Literary Friendship by Erik Hage (review)

How might we recognize the same-sex desire fl owing beneath the surface of nineteenth-century American literary texts when they comply so habitually with the dominant cultural practices of silence and evasion regarding sexuality of all sorts? Greven seeks to answer this question by positing a link between resistance to gender identity norms and queer affects, in which deviations from codes of masculinity and femininity signal “an incipient queer desiring presence” (4). While attentive to the many theorists of sexuality who resist the confl ation of gender non-conformity and same-sex attraction, Greven maintains that we miss a good deal of sexual subtext if we ignore the cultural history of this connection, especially insofar as nineteenth-century texts register same-sex desire as an attraction between apparently unlike and often racially differentiated individuals. Also essential to the theoretical frame is the idea that “gender protest,” defi ned as “a form of mourning for the lost potentialities and possibilities open to the gendered subject,” could both fuel and indicate same-sex desire (39). The introduction offers a robust and, dare one say, passionate appeal for the continuing relevance of psychoanalytic theories of desire to nineteenth-century literary studies, alongside a critique of the constraints of historicism; Greven artfully blends these methodologies in subsequent chapters. The chapter on Redburn (a longer version of an essay that appeared in the June 2014 issue of Leviathan) details the inextricable fascination and horror that same-sex shipboard practices hold for the young narrator Wellingborough Redburn, with particular focus on the villainous Henry Jackson, read as a satirical commentary on Andrew Jackson, and on the unsettling, racialized monument to Lord Nelson in Liverpool. If Greven’s tendency to see homosexual innuendo as near-ubiquitous strains credibility at times (an “&c.” is not necessarily a wink and a nudge), the book nonetheless brings to light numerous plausible subtexts and engages in an especially fi ne reading of the “shudder” as a multivalent register of same-sex desire.

Moby-Dick ed. by Robert C. Evans (review)

A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 107 interest in the bygone world of American whaling. Here one fi nds the usual nineteenth-century lithographs and oil paintings of whale ships and whale hunts, along with a pleasing array of visuals: a map of the route traveled by Chase’s lifeboat, an 1851 whale chart, pages from cabin boy Thomas Nickerson’s diary, whale ship diagrams, Rockwell Kent illustrations, a daguerreotype of New Bedford whalemen, and plenty of photographs: the interiors and exteriors of whaling ships, sperm whales and their skeletons, the Charles W. Morgan of yesteryear and today, whaling tools, scrimshaw, and the oldest surviving sea biscuit. Without announcing itself as a tie-in, the book anticipates the December 2015 release of the fi lm version of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Essex-based In the Heart of the Sea (2000), directed by Ron Howard. Display prominently and use as an au courant conversational springboard to Melville-related topics.