BOOKS
Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.” Greenwood Press, 1996.
Introduction, Notes, Bibliography, Brief Biography, Chronology and other editorial materials for Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Barnes & Noble, 2005.
Inscrutable Malice: Theology, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of “Moby-Dick.” Northern Illinois University, 2012; reissued in paperback, Cornell University Press, Fall 2021.
Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion. Ed. Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers. Northwestern University Press, 2017.
“Neither Believer Nor Infidel”: Skepticism and Faith in Melville’s Short Fiction, Novellas, and Poetry. Under review at Northern Illinois University Press/Cornell University Press.
Harbingers of the Millennium: The Apocalyptic Imagination in American Romantic Literature and Antebellum Culture. Forthcoming.
For copies of articles, please contact me to provide a mailing address.
SCHOLARLY ARTICLES
“Ahab as Gothic Hero-Villain.” In Gothic Melville. Ed. Jeffrey A. Weinstock and Monika Elbert (forthcoming).
“Moby-Dick and Twenty-First Century Theodicy.” Christianity and Literature 70.4 (December 2021) (forthcoming).
“Re-Writing the Holy Land Narrative Tradition: Clarel as Poetic Pilgrimage.” In Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge. New York: Wiley-Blackwell (forthcoming).
“Melville and Hawthorne in the Berkshires: Literary Convergences in Moby-Dick and The House of the Seven Gables.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (October 2020): 43-67.
“An Endless Sermon: Religious Motifs in Melville’s Letters to Hawthorne.” Religion and Literature 51.2 (Summer 2020): 1-22.
“Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’” Religion and the Arts 23 (2019): 489-515.
“Melville and the Lord of Hosts: Holy War and Divine Warrior Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces.” In “This Mighty Convulsion”: Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War. Ed. Christopher Sten and Tyler Hoffman. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. 135-52.
“The Bible and American Literature.” Online Annotated Bibliography for Oxford Bibliographies.
oxfordbibliographies.com.
“God Will Give Him Blood to Drink!” Unholy Dying in The House of the Seven Gables.” In Above the American Renaissance. Ed. Harold K. Bush and Brian Yothers. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. 259-74.
“Hawthorne’s Dismissal from the Salem Custom House and the Thematics of Public Exposure in The Scarlet Letter.” In Critical Insights “The Scarlet Letter.” Ed. Brian Yothers. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2018. 103-20.
“London.” In Herman Melville in Context. Ed Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 45-54.
“Moral Education in ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.’” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (October 2017): 79-99.
“Poverty, Class, and Christian Charity in ‘Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs.’” Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 21.2 (October 2017): 147-67.
“Legends of the Fall: The Bible, Paradise Lost, Schopenhauer, and Billy Budd.” Critical Insights: Billy Budd. Ed. Brian Yothers. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2017. 178-96.
“Clarel and the Victorian Crisis of Faith.” In Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion. Ed. Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017.
“Hawthorne’s Graveyard Humor: ‘Chippings with a Chisel.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 42.2 (Fall 2016): 36-53. To be reprinted in Short Story Criticism – Nathaniel Hawthorne. Gale/Cengage.
“‘The Most Satisfactory Villain That Ever Was’: Charles W. Upham and The House of the Seven Gables,” New England Quarterly 88 (June 2015): 252-85.
“Moby-Dick and Nineteenth-Century Natural History.” In Critical Insights: Moby-Dick. Ed. Robert Evans. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2014.
“Typee and the Myth of Paradise.” In Critical Insights: Herman Melville. Ed. Eric Carl Link. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013.
“Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Papers on Language and Literature 48.1 (Winter 2012): 3-44.
“‘Are Ye, Gods?’ Interrogating the Divine in Melville’s Timoleon, Etc.” EAPSU Online: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work (2011): 6-53. http://mikedmiked.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/EAPSU%20Online%202011.pdf
“Melville’s Mosses Review and the Proclamation of Hawthorne as America’s Literary Messiah.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 11 (October 2008): 62-70.
Introduction and Notes to Melville’s Marginalia in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse.
Melville’s Marginalia Online. www.boisestate.edu/melville/catalogue.
“Christian Typology and Social Critique in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples.’” Christianity and Literature 56 (Fall 2006): 3-31.
“Melville and the Classics,” in Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man; His Masquerade, ed. Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer (2nd ed., New York: Norton, 2006): 344-52.
“The Biographical Background to ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 31 (October 2005): 34-73. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism – Nathaniel Hawthorne. Gale/Cengage (2018).
“The Historical and Literary Sources of Redburn’s ‘Mysterious Night in London,’” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 6 (March 2004): 9-33. Reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vol. 168 (Detroit: Gale Research, 2006).
“‘One of the Most Gifted Women of the Age’: Zenobia, Margaret Fuller, and de Staël’s Corinne in The Blithedale Romance.” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 28 (2003): 35-72.
“History, Legend, and Poetic Tradition in Melville’s ‘The Scout toward Aldie.’” ATQ (new series) 17 (June 2003): 61-80. Reprinted in Southern Cavalry Review (Summer 2017).
“Moby-Dick, Myth and Classical Moralism: Bulkington as Hercules.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 5 (March 2003): 15-28.
“Parke Godwin,” in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 250, Antebellum Writers in New York: Second Series, ed. Kent Ljungquist (Detroit: Gale Group, 2002), 142-47.
“The Downsizing of the American Mind: A Personal Account.” Academic Questions 12 (Fall 1999): 72-85
“From ‘Myth’ to ‘Mystery’: An Emendation of The Confidence-Man.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 1 (March 1999): 73-78.
“The Typological Design of Melville’s ‘The Apple-Tree Table.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40 (June 1998): 121-41.
“‘Prodigious Poop’: Comic Context and Psychological Subtext in Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (March 1995): 483-512.
“Rabelais’ Solar Lamp: A Source for The Confidence-Man.” Melville Society Extracts 91 (June 1994): 1, 4-7.
“New Heavens, Poor Old Earth: Satirical Apocalypse in Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 39 (Fourth Quarter 1993): 209-51.
“Melville’s Man in Gold Sleeve Buttons: Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 34 (Fourth Quarter 1988): 257-81.
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of David B. Diamond, Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2022); in American Imago (forthcoming).
Review of Michael J. Colacurcio, Hawthorne’s Literary History: From Salem to Somewhere Else (New York: Anthem Press, 2022); in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review (forthcoming).
Review of Robert J. Scholnick, Poe’s “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770-1860 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2018); in The Edgar Allan Poe Review 19.2 (Autumn 2020): 286-89.
Review of Yoskiaki Furni, Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019); in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (2020).
Review of John Hadock, Melville’s Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016); in Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 45.2 (2019): 198-204.
Review of Herman Melville, “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 2017); in Resources for American Literature Study 40 (2018): 327-42.
Review of Michael Shelden, Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of “Moby-Dick” (New York: Ecco Press, 2016); in Leviathan 19 (June 2017).
Review of Ilana Pardes, Melville’s Bibles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); in Christianity and Literature (Autumn 2009): 143-47.
Review of “Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby Dick, ed. John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr; in Leviathan 10 (March 2008): 53-59.
Review of Kevin McLaughlin, Paperwork: Fiction and Mass Mediacy in the Paper Age; in The Edgar Allan Poe Review 7 (Spring 2006): 75-79.
Review of Kevin J. Hayes, Melville’s Folk Roots; in Resources for American Literary Study 28 (2002): 192-94.
Review of Alfred Kazin’s God and the American Writer; in The Sunday Oregonian (May 1998).
“Warts and White Whales,” review of Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. I; in the Boston Book Review (March 1997).
“Will the Real Pierre Please Stand Up?,” review of Melville’s Pierre, edited by Hershel Parker; in the Boston Book Review (April 1996).
“A Tourist of the Supernatural,” review of Carol J. Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit; in the Boston Book Review (January 1996).
“Un-Queer Nation,” review of Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality; in the Boston Book Review (October 1995).