Our Paper Allegories

This book unfurls and examines the anti-slavery allegory at the subtextual core of Herman Melville’s famed novel, Moby-Dick. Brian Pellar points to symbols and allusions in the novel such as the albinism of the famed whale, the “Ship of State” motif, Calhoun’s “cords,” the equator, Jonah, Narcissus, St. Paul, and Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan. The work contextualizes these devices within a historical discussion of the Compromise of 1850 and subsequently strengthened Fugitive Slave Laws. Drawing on a rich variety of sources such as unpublished papers, letters, reviews, and family memorabilia, the chapters discuss the significance of these laws within Melville’s own life. After clarifying the hidden allegory interconnecting black slaves and black whales, this book carefully sheds the layers of a hidden meaning that will be too convincing to ignore for future readings: Moby-Dick is ultimately a novel that is intimately connected with questions of race, slavery, and the state.

This book proposes that allegory is not a species of literature but a structure of reading applied to uncomfortable juxtapositions within literary texts. Examples from centuries of response to English Renaissance narrative poetry show not what poems mean but how they may be read and what cultural conditions encourage allegorical or nonallegorical readings. The study also encompasses interpretations of classical verse, biblical parable, Jacobean masque, modern lyric, and television advertising to explore how texts move in and out of the category of allegory.

"Our Paper Allegories" argues that throughout the colonial and antebellum periods in the United States, the artifact of paper frequently operated as an archive of intimate gendered, sexual, racial, and communal relations and histories. Early and nineteenth-century American writers animated these relations in what I call, adapting a phrase from Herman Melville, "paper allegories," or works that create elaborate constructions of affiliation or subjectivity by drawing attention to the paper-based materiality of the text. The Habermasian model of the public sphere has heavily influenced scholarship on early American print culture. In that model, paper, the "body" of the text, recedes from perception in service to the "soul" of print, ideas. This dissertation, in contrast, shows that because American readers and writers were themselves often part of, or at least conscious of, the papermaking process - until 1867 paper was made from linen and cotton rags often recycled from individual households - they were sensitive the potential for narrative to be embedded within, not solely imprinted upon, paper. These "paper allegories" tended to focus on women's bodies and the queer qualities of public intimacy. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which Anne Bradstreet, Lydia Sigourney, Herman Melville, William Wells Brown, authors of ephemeral texts, and others wrote about the materiality of print, each emphasizing the meanings embedded within paper. This dissertation advances the study of print culture and the history of the book by showing how studies have tended to privilege printed text or written words in a way that does not fully account for how early American and nineteenth-century U.S. readers cultivated a sense of the page, a sense that the shredded rags within represented their bodies, identities, labors, and communal and affective ties to one another.

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century. In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling: presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present day considers the relationship between allegory and symbolism analyses the use of allegory in modernist debate and deconstruction, looking at critics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man provides a full glossary of technical terms and suggestions for further reading. Allegory offers an accessible, clear introduction to the history and use of this complex literary device. It is the ideal tool for all those seeking a greater understanding of texts that make use of allegory and of the significance of allegorical thinking to literature.

By acknowledging interpretive theories of the past, Brittan provides a proper historical frame of reference in which today's student can better understand figurative language in poetry.

Quentin Jacobson has spent a lifetime loving Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows. After their all-nighter ends, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo has disappeared.

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.