| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. Ed. by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. x, 475 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3184-7. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5872-1.)
This book takes up with two of the most important writers to emerge from the period of literary ferment leading up to the Civil War. As figures both representative and exceptional, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville wrote pointedly about racial complexity, masculinity, and social violence. Despite their different backgrounds and career trajectories, both struggled with the major themes that have animated nineteenth-century U.S. social history: constructions of freedom, national enterprise, and the politics of representation.	1
The conjunction between Douglass and Melville has hardly gone unexplored, a fact that the editors Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter document with some precision. What distinguishes this collection is that it presents the most sustained and definitive comparison. A central issue at stake is that bringing Douglass and Melville into association—for whatever fuller understandings it may yield—is not just a way to paint black history onto white American romanticist periodization without critically reassessing benchmarks of what constitutes the literary canon. In this respect, the collection is a success.	. . .

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