Description: "This book analyzes the six stories in Melville's 'The Piazza Tales' with an emphasis on issues of embodiment-invalidism or disability, pain, trauma, enslavement, performance, monsters-and related systems of cultural values defined by race, class, and gender"--
Review Quotes:
Ingenious and persuasive. A truly original study on a topic of considerable importance to the field of nineteenth-century American literature.
--Brian Yothers, University of Texas, El Paso, author of Melville's Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America's Most Elusive Author