Medievalists Read Moby Dick (A Roundtable)

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has long been recognized and studied as one of the highlights of nineteenth-century American literature and among the most influential novels ever written. This novel is also deeply appealing to a wide range of medievalists, who are interested in its form, sources, narrative, and production history, just name a few aspects. Our roundtable gathers a range of medievalists to interrogate the appeal of this text to scholars with our particular training. What is it like for a medievalist to read Moby Dick against the background of medieval texts and material culture? How might we contribute to a broader understanding of this text using the tools of medieval studies? We envision a series of short presentations on a select number of these issues followed by a capacious discussion of this text as viewed through our particular scholarly lenses. In a world where the humanities are increasingly dealing with scarcer and scarcer resources, we hope to open a discussion with our colleagues in American Studies and demonstrate to the wider scholarly world the benefits of broad interdisciplinary collaboration.Damian Fleming