Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career

Yothers’ Sacred Uncertainty examines Melville’s engagement with religious difference, both within American culture and around the world. It is impossible to understand Melville’s wider engagement with religious and cultural questions, however, without understanding the fundamental tension between self and society, self and others that underlies his work, and that is manifested in particular in the way in which he interacts with other writers. There is almost certainly no more concrete or reliable way to get at Melville’s affirmations of and arguments with these interlocutors than in the markings and annotations that appear in his copies of many of their works, so Yothers examines Melville’s marginalia for clues to Melville’s thinking about self, other, and difference. Sacred Uncertainty provides a much needed exploration of Melville’s encounter with and reflection upon religious difference.

BRIAN YOTHERS is a professor of English at the University of Texas, El Paso. He is the author of Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author and The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876. Yothers is the associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, a coeditor of the travel section of the Melville Electronic Library, an associate editor for Melville’s Marginalia Online, a coeditor of the interdisciplinary journal Journeys, and an editor for the book series Literary Criticism in Perspective.