TY - JOUR
T1 - Jupiter underwritten
T2 - Melville's unsafe home
AU - Wertheimer, Eric
PY - 2003/9
Y1 - 2003/9
N2 - Taking Herman Melville's short story "The Lighting-Rod Man" (1854) as my interpretive reference point, in this essay I seek to understand how the idea of accidental loss was critical to the unfolding of Melville's career as a writer. The story manages to satirize commercial language as well as the discourses of safety and insurance underwriting that were part of Melville's bitter experience with his own property - whether as a homeowner or author. Moreover, the thematics of safety are discussed in the contexts of the legal and philosophical currents within the historical period, showing how Melville participates in a response to modernity that was uniquely centered on a critique of language.
AB - Taking Herman Melville's short story "The Lighting-Rod Man" (1854) as my interpretive reference point, in this essay I seek to understand how the idea of accidental loss was critical to the unfolding of Melville's career as a writer. The story manages to satirize commercial language as well as the discourses of safety and insurance underwriting that were part of Melville's bitter experience with his own property - whether as a homeowner or author. Moreover, the thematics of safety are discussed in the contexts of the legal and philosophical currents within the historical period, showing how Melville participates in a response to modernity that was uniquely centered on a critique of language.
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U2 - 10.1525/ncl.2003.58.2.176
DO - 10.1525/ncl.2003.58.2.176
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:60949776202
SN - 0891-9356
VL - 58
SP - 176
EP - 201
JO - Nineteenth-Century Literature
JF - Nineteenth-Century Literature
IS - 2
ER -