We have arrived at a contemplative moment in our relation with the least containable or, to use Melville's own image, most Vesuvian of classic American writers. One sign of this reflective mood is that each contributor to this book takes seriously the word “companion” in its title - a word at odds with the sort of performative criticism in which the literary text becomes a stage upon which the critic feels entitled, even required, to mount a show.

The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, by contrast, is conceived and written in a spirit of deference to, though hardly uncritical reverence for, its subject. We hope the result is a book worth consulting, disputing, and - if it does its job - soon supplanting. One reason a work of this sort may be useful at the present time is that the conditions for thinking about Melville have changed substantially from what they were even a decade ago. Seven years past the centenary of his death, virtually all his writings, including his letters and journals, have now reached print (or are soon to be published) in the Newberry Library-Northwestern University Press edition, which is justly recognized as one of the monuments of modern textual scholarship.