Style in Melville's Anatomies

Abstract

Melville scholars gathered virtually as part of the 2021 American Literature Association Conference to celebrate and re-assess the contribution made by a landmark volume in late twentieth-century scholarship on Melville, Samuel Otter’s Melville’s Anatomies (1999). The roundtable had initially been planned as a face-to-face contribution to the 2020 ALA Conference, which was cancelled due to COVID, and so the scholars who had initially meant to discuss Otter’s book near the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its publication found that their conversations had to be delayed by a year. We offer the full reflections of the six scholars who discussed the volume in hopes that this can serve as a model for future reflections on landmarks of Melville scholarship and major new contributions to the field that can appear in this venue. © 2022 The Melville Society and Johns Hopkins University Press