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Accepted Paper:

In the Wake of the Gods: Melville's Ocean and the Pagan World  
Simon Edwards (Center for Inter-American Studies - University of Graz)

Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to analyse the relations between Melville's Moby Dick and classical literature.

Paper long abstract:

Moby Dick, set in the 'watery two thirds of the world', is notoriously richly allusive. Bruce Franklin's The Wake of the Gods offers one of the boldest interpretative maps by showing how the whole body of his work is invested in pre-classical, even non-Western mythology, drawing on Diodorus Siculus' and Plutarch's attribution of the origins of myth to the Egyptians. During the period of its composition Melville and Hawthorne were close neighbours in the Berkshire Hills. Precisely when Hawthorne was working on his versions of the Tanglewood Tales. Melville's prodigious reading in the five preceding years must have been capped by his friend's shared interest in the Greek stories, divinities and heroes - versions of earlier myths - that served to bring into question the Calvinist convictions in which they had both been reared. Moreover Melville, from his Polynesian experiences (cf Typee, Omoo, and Mardi), had developed an interest in that wider comparative anthropology that had vexed the Christian world from the time of the neo-Platonists with some of whose English disciples he had become familiar. Diffusionist theories of the nature of religious cults, the rise of Freemasonry whose symbols are inscribed on the dollar bill, Champollion's de-coding of the Rosetta Stone (as well as William Jones' postulation of a common Indo-european tongue) were part of this intellectual culture.

If Hawthorne's project was to 'Americanise' in popular form the Greek tales then Melville sought to explore what underlay the American impulse to industrial progress, maritime adventure, and an aspirant global hegemony.

Panel P11
The ocean and its stories
  Session 1