Exiled Royalties

Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. The ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life, '" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. The title essay takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab," Melville's mythic projection of his own feelings of emotional and ontological disinheritance. How to live nobly in spiritual exile-to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God-was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. Exiled Royalties explores the ways in which Melville satisfied this impulse throughout his forty-five year career, how it shaped the matter and manner of his work, and how his writing, in turn, reflexively bore upon his private life and upon the life of the nation.


"A magisterial work from one of our very best readers of Melville. Robert Milder's beautifully written essays illuminate Melville's views on history, politics, sexuality and religion. But most importantly, they illuminate the grand reach of Melville's tragic art."-Robert Levine, University of Maryland.

"Combining shrewd social and historical analysis with rare psychological, intellectual, and moral insight, these essays, seeking to understand Melville's writing from, as it were, the inside out-form enabling, not just representing, the life imagined-recall the very best criticism of an F. O. Matthiessen or a Newton Arvin. This is creation of its own, in Byron's words, living 'a being more intense.'''-Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Milder's fine chapter on Battle Pieces develops a resonant, complex, and intriguing sense of the relation between Melville's dark sense of the "tragic" adn his political notions of an American democracy, reminding us again of the central place these still-neglected later writings must occupy in any complete understanding of Melville's career and vision."--The New England Quarterly