NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Four years of Pacific Ocean adventures in the early 1840s informed classic novels by Herman Melville including Moby Dick and Typee, but until recently the full story of those formative years of the author had not been told.
At 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 13, two Vanderbilt University English professors will join with an editor of the new book Herman Melville’s Whaling Years for a discussion of Melville’s years on whaling vessels and how they impacted his writing.
The event in room Room 126 of Wilson Hall is free and open to the public.
Vanderbilt University alumnus Wilson Heflin, who died in 1985, made it his life’s work to detail those years of Melville’s life. His research was edited by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan into Herman Melville’s Whaling Years, released this year by Vanderbilt University Press.
The panel discussion will include Heffernan; Sean X. Goudie, assistant professor of English; and Drayton Nabers, assistant professor of English.
"We’ll speak to the relevance of Herman Melville’s Whaling Years to newly emergent discussions in Melville studies, including Melville’s treatments of colonialism and imperialism in his fiction and his commentary on sectional division in the antebellum and post-Civil War Reconstruction periods in his little examined, but important, poetry," Goudie said.
Goudie says the release of Herman Melville’s Whaling Years is "an act of deep affection and profound respect for one of the most influential Melville scholars of the 20th century," and a gift to a new generation of Melville scholars of "new and exciting information with which to gauge Melville’s impressive achievement in his Pacific writings."
A reception will follow the hour-long program, which is sponsored by Vanderbilt University Press and the College of Arts and Science.
For information about Herman Melville’s Whaling Years, contact Vanderbilt University Press at 615-343-2446 or http://www.vanderbilt.edu/vupress/.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu