Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism by Wai-chee Dimock

This monograph links a formal reading of Melville's novels (except Typee and Omoo) to an historical reading of Jacksonian individualism and national expansion. As Dimock explains in her first chapter, "indeed, it is through Melville, through his authorial exercises in freedom and dominion, that we are able to see Manifest Destiny--not as most of us see it now, as a quaint idea, but as innumerable antebellum Americans saw it, as a powerful account of national and individual destiny, an account that conferred on both the nation and the self a sense of corporeal autonomy in space, and teleological ascendancy in time" (10-11). Her account of Jacksonian individualism and Jacksonian imperialism in the first chapter gives her work a solid grounding in history, and her readings of the novels themselves are quite persuasive. This monograph is a great example of criticism at its best: a reading of cultural texts that provides larger contexts while offering a theoretical structure.