Melville

This study looks at the whole body of Herman Melville's fiction, paying particular attention to his less-studied works. Its angle on Melville is that clothing carries social meaning. The author examines dress as a marker of status and power, the ways clothing can break social rules, what uniforms signify, and how a single garment can express several identities at once. Anxiety about modernity runs throughout.

Clothing, in these readings, is tied to some of Melville's central concerns: the link between private selfhood and public role, the persistence of social inequality, the connection between authority and justice, and the boundary between the civilized and the savage. Garments can show how identity might be reshaped, along with the limits of that change, and they can stand in for writing itself. The book also draws on theories of modernity, including the work of Anthony Giddens and the figure of the dandy, to explore identity in transition.

To place Melville's interest in clothing in context, the book compares his work with texts such as Robinson Crusoe and The Scarlet Letter and with novelists including James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Jack London and George Orwell. Its central concern is the act of writing and the publication history of each text.