Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman

Michael Jonik teaches American literature at the University of Sussex. He writes on pre-1900 American literature, continental philosophy, and the history of science, with essays on Berkeley, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and James. He has won a Cornell Society for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Leverhulme Research Grant, and, in 2015, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy prize 'for the paper that makes the most significant contribution to the history of American Philosophy from colonial times to the present.' He is founding member of The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and Reviews and Special Issues editor for Textual Practice.

• Introduction: Melville's inhumanities; 1. 'The constituents of a chaos': character, materiality and ethopolitics in Moby-Dick; 2. A geology of murmurs: Pierre's inhuman transformations; 3. Outlandish beings, outlandish politics: 'The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles'; 4. Misanthropology: commonality and its discontents in The Confidence-Man; 5. 'Where wild rocks are set': character and the space of Clarel; 6. Form, relation, and dissolution in Melville's later poetry; Coda: impulsive Billy Budd.

'Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman brilliantly captures many of these valuable strains in Melville's work, and it is most useful - and most pleasurable to think with - when it does so.' Adam Fales, The British Society for Literature and Science (bsls.ac.uk)