Herman Melville and the American Calling

Argues that Herman Melville's later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global "war on terror." Oriented by the new Americanist perspective, this book constitutes a rereading of Herman Melville's most prominent fiction after Moby-Dick. In contrast to prior readings of this fiction, William V. Spanos's interpretation takes as its point of departure the theme of spectrality precipitated by the metaphor of orphanage-disaffiliation from the s