Frank has put together a wonderful series of essays that capture the diversity of Melville's thought in all its intensity, complexity, and nuance. This is a fantastic book that is well deserving of the attention of political theorists, literary critics, and Melville scholars alike.
~Simon Stow, The College of William and Mary
"'America's Marx'" (as Michael Rogin called him)? Or 'American's Ishmael' (as Jason Frank proposes)? Either way, Herman Melville is, as Jason Frank suggests in his fine introduction to this comprehensive volume, a writer ripe for political theoretical inquiry, right alongside Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. Timely and long overdue, this volume puts Melville on the map of political theory, right where he belongs. No course on American Political Thought will leave Melville out now, nor will students in those classes be able to proceed without consulting this valuable collection."—Bonnie Honig, Brown University
"The scholars in this excellent collection confront the towering genius of Melville with remarkable intellectual courage. They explore with open minds the overt and implicit political meanings of his work and collaborate to make a fresh contribution to the literature on Melville."—George Kateb, emeritus, Princeton University
This collection brings together fourteen consistently stimulating and often profound meditations on the political theory at work in the writings of Herman Melville. Indeed, I have seldom read a collection of essays offering such stunningly diverse insights and of such uniformly high quality. The volume will interest all Melville readers and scholars, but perhaps especially those in US literary and cultural studies, who may discover here that the questions posed by cutting-edge political theory can illuminate — and transform our understanding of — a major American author."—Nick Bromell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy
