Professor Meredith Farmer was recently featured on the podcast of C19: The Society of Nineteenth Century Americanists in a wonderful and ranging piece on the women whose work enabled, settled, and sustained the idea of “Herman Melville,” both in the popular imagination and in the academy. This episode explores the extraordinary efforts that Elizabeth Melville undertook, after her husband Herman’s death, to republish his books and to preserve his records. Examining the way that Elizabeth’s efforts were written out of the “Melville Studies” that her labors helped to found, it considers larger philosophical questions about how many lives stand behind the career that One Great Man gets to have. This episode was produced by Adam Fales (UChicago) and Jordan Alexander Stein (Fordham), and it features Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore), Meredith Farmer (Wake Forest), Laura Heffernan (North Florida), Natasha Hurley (UAlberta), Wyn Kelley (MIT), Laurie Robertson-Lorant (UMass Dartmouth), and Elizabeth Renker (Ohio State). Additional production support by Rachel Boccio.
Full episode transcript available here: bit.ly/C19PodS03E02.