Melville's Other Lives

Melville's Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza Tales-Herman Melville's only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime-and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville's stories. Christopher Sten provides fresh critical readings of the six stories in Melville's book based on issues of invalidism or disability, pain, trauma, enslavement, performance, and monsters in relation to systems of cultural value defined by race, class, and gender.