Melville and the politics of identity: From *King Lear* to *Moby-Dick*

Melville and the Politics of Identity explores the ideological transaction between Shakespeare’s most philosophically political play and America’s most philosophically political novel. Julian Markel takes as his point of departure the scholarly tradition that sees in King Lear a dramatization of the transition from feudal to bourgeois culture. He shows how Melville takes up the “ideological unfinished business” of Shakespeare’s play to dramatize in Moby Dick a distinctive American tension between private and competition and mutual responsibility within bourgeois individualism. Tracing the ideological conflicts encompassed by Moby Dick to their analogs in the theories of Hooker, Hobbes, and Locke, Markels argues that Melville’s novel “articulates the unique aspirations and underlying fears of American culture at a commanding moment of national self-awareness.”
Markel’s work will be of interest to students of intellectual history, American studies, and philosophical anthropology as well as literary critics.