From the Mast-Head

Abstract

Readers will recall that our last issue (Leviathan 13.3) was a special issue featuring essays edited by Hilton Obenzinger and Basem Ra’ad, most of which were developed from papers delivered at our “Melville and the Mediterranean” conference in Jerusalem, 2009. Our present number also includes a special issue, this time appearing in our recurring department “Extracts,” and squired into existence by our associate editor Samuel Otter. It features keynote addresses, reports, and a photo gallery, all drawn from another momentous conference, “Melville and Rome,” which took place in Rome and Naples, on June 22–26, 2011. In keeping with other special issues of “Extracts” like it, the present number celebrates the Melville Society’s tradition of biannual international conferences begun in 1997. In due course, Leviathan will also publish a special issue of essays drawn from the Rome conference. But for the moment, contemplating the sequence of one conference-related special issue after another has brought a feeling of convergence and yet loss. Our international conferences—one every two years, with future ones being planned, as we speak, for Washington, DC, Tokyo, and other venues on up to the much anticipated bicentennial year of 2019—remind us of how much the Melville Society has grown in the past two decades. Augmenting its scholarly reputation as a leading single-author society is the Melville Society Cultural Project (MSCP), which maintains a thriving archive and coordinates outreach programs at home and abroad. And the society’s new affiliation with the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) signals our further development into the digital world. Similarly, our international conferences have brought together in ever-larger numbers diverse scholars from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas. Increasingly, the Melville Society is becoming the cosmopolitan crew it always aimed to be from its beginnings in 1947. But with this sense of convergence coming out of this past year of growth and celebration also comes a sense of loss with the passing of three deeply admired Melville scholars, two of whom are memorialized in our pages here—Walter Bezanson and Stanton Garner—and one to be memorialized in a later issue: Milton Stern. Each was old enough in their final year to have known a time when Melville was not a cultural icon of world literature but a newly resurrected literary question mark. For them, Melville was still terra incognita, and while, in my view, Melville always remains deliciously, fruitfully