Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne And the Antemosaic Cosmic Man: Race, Class And the Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer

In Europe, after 1848, bourgeois consciousness in revolt sought a new universal in the working class but soon found itself in the orbit of the state civil service; in America, bourgeois consciousness in revolt found a new universal in what Melville called “antemosaic” reality, Queequeg, embodied in the multiracial working class, the “anacharsis Cloots deputation,” in radical antithesis to the state. Through a series of scholarly, linked essays, Goldner examines the works of Melville, the dispossessed grand bourgeois, and his treatment of race and class. The 1848-1850 conjuncture in the Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx), modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or Second Law of Thermodynamics. Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville’s work echoes each of them. Echoing the work of CLR James, this is a majestic, multidisciplinary sweep through history, culture, politics, philosophy and art.