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"In the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006), Wyn Kelley framed this American author as a Global Melville. While further demonstrating Melville's global reach, this New companion, with co-editor Christopher Ohge, focuses on a Fluid Melville, engaging with new topics, technologies, and approaches that have altered the way we read Melville into the future. Readership of Melville's works has grown since the first edition. Samuel Otter, erstwhile editor of Leviathan, states that, "when I served on the editorial board of American Literature, I was told that they received more submissions on Melville than on any other author" (1). Since the bicentennial celebrations of Melville's birth in 2019, there has been an outpouring of international conferences (New York, Paris, Lisbon, to name a few), as well as of new or forthcoming papers, articles, and books, with titles on Melville and religion, philosophy, science, poetry, technology, and biography. Exciting developments at the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) and Melville's Marginalia Online (MMO) place digital editing and archives at the cutting edge of critical approaches to Melville. Melville continues to be featured on university and high-school reading lists, and the Teachers' Summer Institute on " Moby-Dick and the World of Whaling in the Digital Age," first offered in 2018 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA, received new funding in 2021 from the National Endowment for the Humanities"--
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