Melville: Fashioning in Modernity considers all of the major fiction
with a concentration on lesser-known work, and provides a radically
fresh approach to Melville, focusing on: clothing as socially symbolic;
dress, power and class; the transgressive nature of dress; inappropriate
clothing; the meaning of uniform; the multiplicity of identity that
dress may represent; anxiety and modernity. The representation of
clothing in the fiction is central to some of Melville's major themes;
the relation between private and public identity, social inequality and
how this is maintained; the relation between power, justice and
authority; the relation between the "civilized" and the "savage."
Frequently clothing represents the malleability of identity (its
possibilities as well as its limitations), represents writing itself, as
well as becoming indicative of the crisis of modernity. Clothing also
becomes a trope for Melville's representations of authorship and of his
own scene of writing. Melville: Fashioning in Modernity also
encompasses identity in transition, making use of the examination of
modernity by theorists such as Anthony Giddens, as well as on theories
of figures such as the dandy. In contextualizing Melville's interest in
clothing, a variety of other works and writers is considered; works such
as Robinson Crusoe and The Scarlet Letter, and novelists such as
Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Jack London, and
George Orwell. The book has at its core a consideration of the scene of
writing and the publishing history of each text.
