This collection is both a handbook to Melville and a provocation. As expected of a Cambridge Companion, it provides readers with comprehensive analyses of the major writings and motifs of a canonized master of world literature. At the same time, this volume has been conceived in a Melvillean spirit of suspicion and revision. Accordingly, it is animated by a dialectical interplay between traditional and newer approaches to Melville. This is a particularly opportune time for such a volume. Over the past two decades or so, the “American Renaissance” has been dramatically reconceived by feminist, African-American, new historical, and other critical approaches. Such key works as Michael Rogin's Subversive Genealogy (1983), Waichee Dimock's Empire for Liberty (1989), and Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations (1993) are but three of the many books that have offered new ways of thinking about the ideological and political implications of Melville's art. There have also been major developments in more traditional, archivally based Melville scholarship. Recent discoveries of Melville family papers (now at the New York Public Library), the publication of such important works as John Bryant's Melville and Repose (1993), Stanton Garner's The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), several volumes in the nearly completed Northwestern-Newberry edition of Herman Melville, and biographies by Laurie Robertson-Laurant (1996) and Hershel Parker (1996) have helped us to make better sense of Melville's compositional practices, aesthetics, sources, biography, and relation to contemporaneous literary debates.