Graduate Student, Research Institute for the Humanities
Thesis Title: The Material Marketplace in the Later Fiction of Herman Melville
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Professor Ian Bell
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About
My PhD investigates Herman Melville's engagement with the conditions of literary production in his fiction between his 1849 novel 'Redburn' and his final completed novel, 1857's 'The Confidence-Man'. Attempting to balance criticism that has emphasised Melville's hostility towards the literary marketplace, I analyse how his authorial practice appropriates the mechanisms through which books were made, circulated and consumed in the mid-nineteenth century. Taking the materiality of the text as a starting point for literary analysis, I plan to examine such topics as the commodity text, metaphors of exchange, the physicality of paper and the influence of the periodical press. I am also considering how this engagement with the market connects to wider discourses of value, authority and originality in Melville's work.
More broadly, my research interests centre on transatlantic literature of the long nineteenth-century, especially the novel. I am particularly interested in print culture
and book history, the impact of industrialisation and market capitalism, and the relationship between high and low culture in the period. I take an interdisciplinary approach to research, and am excited by the insights gained through the intersections of literary study with disciplines such as Art History, Economics, Law and the History of Science. Having benefited from digitisation of texts in my own work, I am also keen to explore the ways in which the Digital Humanities can assist researchers.
