The necessity of experience. The happy valley: Typee and the impossibility of paradise

Dear Delusion: Redburn and the test of tradition

To nationalize with the universe: Democracy and identity in White-Jacket

Experience and transcendence. Flood-gates of the wonder-world: portents of the transcendent and the generic question of Moby-Dick

The groves of our Thessalies: the early works and the metaphysics of Moby-Dick

The span of portents: the career of Ishmael's self-transcendence

Trials of transcendence. Damned in the midst of paradise: "Peril in Man" in Moby-Dick and Pierre

In partibus infidelium: Billy Budd and the part of wonder in a man-of-war world

Delphic deliverances: narrative didacticism and the tragedy of Herman Melville.