Melville's Democracy

Jennifer Greiman is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University.

1. Green Things and Verdant Recesses: Imperial History, State-of-Nature Theory, and the Color of Democracy (Typee) 2. Verdigris: Color, Tone, and Radical Democracy (Pierre) 3. Round Robins and Insphered Spheres: Revolution, Representation, and the Shape of Founding (Omoo and Mardi) 4. "Circles upon circles": Sovereignty, Equality, and the Shape of Democracy (Moby-Dick) 5. "And apoplexy has its fall": Slavery, Prophecy, and the Gravity of Democracy ("The Bell Tower" and Battle-Pieces) 6. Unplanted to the Last: Democratic Grass and Groundless Aesthetics (Israel Potter, Clarel and Billy Budd)

"Greiman succeeds at the difficult task of saying something new about democracy in her original reading of Melville as a systematic thinker of it. This is an excellent book, wonderfully written and researched."-Branka Arsic, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau "Enthralling and fearless, Greiman's sensuous dive into Melville's poetics and political thinking excites and holds us tight in a world like no other. A brilliant breakthrough in close reading and political thinking. Democracy will never be the same."-Colin Dayan, author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life "In Greiman's dazzling analysis, Melville emerges as a political theorist in his own right whose 'figurative imagination' gives us new forms, new language, new narratives to explore what democracy is and what it should be."-Nathan Wolff, author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age "Greiman's Emersonian demonstration shows that however incomplete its figures, Melville's democracy is not formless. Both a regime and a process, Melville's democracy is held fluid by, and as, a practice of form that may be called aesthetics. Greiman needs to be thanked for making these complex geometrical entanglements beautifully clear."-Cecile Roudeau, Leviathan "Including a cogent, wide-ranging introduction and a useful overview of other approaches to Melville and democracy, this is a fascinating, valuable contribution to Melville studies. Essential."-J. W. Miller, CHOICE "Melville's Democracy makes a major and triple contribution-to Melville scholarship, democratic theory, and literary theory.... Melville's Democracy, as an insightful, dense, and beautifully written tableau of Melville's democratic aesthetics, may very well be itself one of these supplements so important to democracy."-Edouard Marsoin, American Literary History "There is simply no corner of Melville's work that does not focus on politics as practice or theory. And yet, as Jennifer Greiman reminds us in her searching and absorbing book, Melville's Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form, there is nothing like consensus in the critical literature about what Melville's political ruminations add up to.... Reading such work is a bracing and freeing experience."-Jonathan Elmer, Nineteenth-Century Literature