Handsomely Done

"Handsomely Done is one of the best book-length marryings of critical theory with Melville's works. There is a great value in a politically focused updating of the relationship between Melville and critical theory, and this collection will be a landmark event in the ongoing development of that relationship." --Geoffrey Sanborn, author of The Value of Herman Melville

"A vibrant, fascinating collection of essays on the permanently powerful, enigmatic corpus of Melville's writings. The analyses range across the canonical and not-so-canonical texts, articulating them with compelling works of art and pertinent historical configurations in Melville's aftermath. Diverse in their objects haunted or informed by Melville, these intense essays never fail to illuminate. Their close attention does a kind of belated justice to Melville too often denied in his lifetime." --Ian Balfour

". . . wide-ranging and engagingly cosmopolitan . . . It constitutes an important contribution to any serious Melvillean's bookshelf, and it is likely to kindle the enthusiasm of new readers of Melville from across languages and disciplines." --Brian Yothers, The Comparatist

"Hand-somely Done follows trajectories from Melville's writing across the boundaries of nation, discipline, language, and medium in search of new forms of political, aesthetic, and intellectual potentiality . . . What this volume does with particular acuity is to register the tensions of [a] 'disjunctive translation' between media, languages, and disciplines." --Peter Jaros, Leviathan

"Handsomely Done makes one of the strongest cases yet for how Melville has become the favored literary author of contemporary critical theory. Tracing Melville's afterlife in philosophical, political, and aesthetic adaptations-by everyone from Carl Schmitt and the Red Army Faction to Jean-Luc Godard and Claire Denis-Hoffman-Schwartz and the contributors to this collection locate Melville's enduring relevance in the experimental adaptations and mediations his own work performs. --Jennifer Greiman