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The first major effort in twenty years to reassess the relationship between Melville and Hawthorne

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers.

Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers' relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that "looms like a grand hooded phantom" over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence-Hawthorne's on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville's on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances-are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville's search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville's times.

Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.

Jana L. Argersinger is a coeditor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism and serves as president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Leland S. Person is a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

June 2008

ISBN 0820330965 paper • $26.95

"This engaging-sometimes even moving-collection produces a compelling, multi-directional dialogue about how readers might understand the substance of the provocatively cryptic relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Whatever their answers, the essays included here manage to convey the critical liveliness that each scholar brings to the incomplete dialogue between these two centrally important U.S. writers."
—Dana D. Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University