Ahab Unbound

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"For years critics have viewed Herman Melville's Captain Ahab as the paradigm of a strong, controlling agent. Farmer and Schroeder's volume aims to rethink Ahab through a series of "materialist" frames, including posthumanism, disability studies, affect theory, animal studies, environmental humanities, systems theory, and oceanic studies. The essays here recast Ahab as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment--by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing--in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. Collectively these materialist readings challenge our ways of thinking about the boundaries of both persons and actions, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by 'personhood' and by the 'human"-- Provided by publisher