Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
A bounty of scholarly articles, notes, reviews, and creative writing of a critical, theoretical, cultural, or historical nature on Herman Melville.
About the Journal
Our award-winning journal, published three times a year by Johns Hopkins University Press, features scholarly articles, notes, reviews, creative writing, interviews, and book reviews by established and younger scholars for an academic and wider public audience, domestic and international. Its “Extracts” section reports on Melville Society news and Melville-related events in each issue. Recent special issues of Leviathan have focused on Melville’s late writings; digital humanities analyses of Melville’s marginalia in Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton; new artistic responses to Moby-Dick, and the completion of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Writings of Herman Melville.
Leviathan is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press and is available online through Project Muse.
The Henry Murray Endowment, begun in 1990 with a donation by Henry Murray, provides minimal stipends for Leviathan’s editorial staff. Membership dues pay for only half of our publication costs. We seek additional funding to augment the Murray stipends and to cover production expenses.
Leviathan, 27.3
(October 2025)
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About the Current Issue
Leviathan 27.3 This special issue collects case studies that highlight the range of queer Melvilleana and in the process contribute to an understanding of the aesthetic shape assumed by queer creative impulses. “Melville’s queer afterlives” names an archive of engagements with and revisions of the work of Herman Melville that extend beyond the scholarly. These afterlives are queer in multiple senses: anchored in Melville’s own interests in sex, gender, sexuality, and the relationships between them, as well as positioned against social expectations, perceptions, categories, and norms, these afterlives offer instead interpretations of and responses to Melville that foreground, refashion, and develop the imaginative possibilities that his work proposes, or even just suggests.