Melville's art of democracy

the long version

In Melville's Art of Democracy, Nancy Fredricks examines Melville's search for literary strategies compatible with egalitarian, democratic, and multicultural values. Fredricks argues that Melville's concern with the limits of representation is central both to his literary aesthetic and to his interest in exploring the "unrepresentedness" of marginalized social groups, including women, ethnic minorities, and the underclass. Through readings of Moby-Dick and Pierre, as well as some of Melville's short stories, the author traces the development of Melville's egalitarian aesthetic in relation to Kant's critique of fanaticism and theory of the sublime and contemporaneous developments in nineteenth-century American landscape painting, theater, and the philosophy of music. This challenging and timely study demonstrates that the problems Melville faced as a writer - the relationship between politics and aesthetics and the representation of the marginalized without appropriation - are similar to issues faced in the academy today.