Ungraspable Phantom

Essays on Moby-Dick

John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781606350683
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631010309
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A collection of essays presented at the sesquicentenary Moby-Dick conference

The twenty-one essays collected in "Ungraspable Phantom" are from an international conference held in 2001 celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick. The essays reflect not only a range of problems and approaches but also the cosmopolitan perspective of international scholarship. They offer new thoughts on familiar topics: the novel's problematic structure, its sources in and reinvention of the Bible, its Lacanian and post-Freudian psychology, and its rhetoric. They also present fresh information on new areas of interest: Melville's creative process, law and jurisprudence, Freemasonry and labor, race, Latin Americanism, and the Native American.

Scholars, students, and readers of Moby-Dick will find this collection of essays fresh and insightful.

Index

Abraham Barker, the, 341

Abrams, M. H., 193

Adams, John, 121

adaptations, 10, 287–88, 292; illustrated, for children, 275, 282, 284–88; theatrical and musical, 321–22. See also names of individual artists

Adinolfi, Carlo, 311, 320n14, 321, 322, 325

Adler, Dr. George J., 5, 101, 107–10, 112n9, 113n11

Adler, Joyce Sparer, 319n4, 322, 333

Afghanistan, 267, 330, 332

African American: culture, 210, 215–16, 217–18, 222, 353n23; sailors, 341, 344, 346, 352n16; African American women, 298, 307–8, 317–18. See also blacks; Cole, Nora; race

Agate, Alfred T., 233

agency, 63, 66, 155, 156, 204, 213, 263, 308; divine, 45; moral, 147, 151

Aguiar, Luiz Antonio, 286

Ahab, xii, 45, 48, 53, 170, 173, 194, 211, 221–22, 229; Anderson and, 293; duty to shareholders, 171; Eckert and, 297, 317, 328; lameness of, 55n9; mania of, 5, 18, 32, 55n11, 63, 88, 101, 106, 167, 177; and Native Americans, 244; as obsessive, 62–69; as “pervert” (Lacan), 68–72; in Portuguese, 287; and Queequeg and Ishmael, x, xi; rage of, xiii, xvii; wife, 306, 307. See also cinema; film adaptations; and individual movies

Albatross, the, 19, 33, 176, 192

alcohol, 90, 91, 175

Alexander, J. Grubb, 306

Alleghanies, 190

allegorical readings, 16, 81, 84, 188, 215, 216, 231

Altieri, Charles, 151

Alves, Cintia, 287

Amado, Jorge, 287

American Pendulum Press, 286

Anderson, Laurie, 303n5, 303n7, 340; production, 11, 291–98, 300–301, 302n1, 309, 321–22, 325, 352n12; and women, 306, 308, 311, 315, 318, 333

Andes, 232, 233

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface: “To Fight Some Other World”
• Introduction: Renderings of the Whale
• Constructing Moby-Dick: Breakdown and Redemption
• Man, Mind, Whale
• Moby-Dick and Law
• Reading and Mapping
• Flood-Gates of the Wonder World: Race and the Americas
• Very Like a Whale: Moby-Dick in Translation
• Modern Breachings: Moby-Dick on Stage and Web
• General Works Cited
• Index