Pequod on the Seine: Translating Melville in War and Peace

FAIN: FT-270357-20

Jordan Alexander Stein
Fordham University (Bronx, NY 10458-9993)

Research leading to a book on the translation and reception of the works of Herman Melville, American novelist, in France and Belgium.

Pequod on the Seine identifies and explores the networks and exchanges that made Melville’s works visible and significant to the French and European literary worlds engaged in the national conflicts of the Second World War. My study contravenes the dominant scholarly narrative of the “Melville revival” of the 1920s—the discovery and republication events thirty years after Melville’s death that rescued his novels from oblivion—showing that this story about American literature typically, and incorrectly, confines itself to the boundaries of the United States. My research corrects for the US-national focus, locating the uptake of Melville’s writings between the United States, France, and Belgium. Focusing on Melville, my study takes as its premise that even the most canonical objects for the study of US culture have both existence and afterlives beyond that culture.