NP Melville's cross-cultural homoeroticism

[jbor]

Recent NYT review of Caleb Crain's study of 19th C. American writers, 
_AMERICAN SYMPATHY: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation_ (New
Haven: Yale University Press) includes a link to the first chapter.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/03/reviews/010603.03robblt.html

Some quotes from Graham Robb's review:

    The homoeroticism of Melville and Whitman is so bold and full-bodied
    that it takes a great deal of critical ingenuity to explain it all away.
    ''Cold war readers,'' Caleb Crain says, ''decided that the message'' of
    ''Billy Budd'' was ''authority,'' while ''formalist readers . . . were
    so pleased with their knowing identification of Melville's slipperiness
    that they decided that the slipperiness was the message.''

    [ ... ]

    Yet Crain's thoughtful and original essay on ''Billy Budd,'' which
    serves as a conclusion, shows that ''indirection'' gave writers ''a
    wider scope for artistic experiment, self-knowledge and emotional
    license.'' Melville's homosexual characters never inhabited the glum,
    professional ghettos of 19th-century psychology or modern theory. Like
    everyone else, they lived in the great outdoors of human experience.
    ''It would not have occurred to Melville,'' Crain says, ''that male
    sexual desire for men was something that needed to be affirmed (or
    denied). It was a fact of shipboard life, sometimes to be celebrated,
    sometimes to be regretted -- much like sexual desire on land.''

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