Geoffrey Sanborn is currently the Henry S. Poler '59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Plagiarama!: William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (2016), Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and the Maori (2011), and The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (1998). He has also co-edited Melville and Aesthetics (2011) with Samuel Otter and published cultural-historical editions of William Wells Brown's Clotel (2016) and Herman Melville's Typee (2003). His essays on writers such as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Edgar Allan Poe, Sandra Cisneros, and James Fenimore Cooper, have appeared in American Literature, PMLA, J19, African American Review, ELH, and elsewhere. His essay 'Whence Come You, Queequeg?' won the Foerster Prize for Best Essay in American Literature in 2006 and his essay 'Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment' won the Parker Prize for Best Essay in PMLA in 2002.

Introduction; 1. Living the experience; 2. He knew not what it would become; 3. Grief's fire; 4. Susceptibilities; 5. Disportings; 6. A new way of being happy; 7. The meaning of Moby-Dick; 8. As if; 9. Camp Melville; 10. Courting surprise; 11. All things trying; 12. The non-communicating central self.