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, 27.1
(March 2025)
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About the Current Issue
Leviathan 27.1 includes an article by Sarah Leilani Parijs on Melville’s animal apocalypse in Moby-Dick and a special issue celebrating the centennial of the publication of Billy Budd, with an introduction by Jennifer Greiman and Brian Yothers contributions by Jeffrey Einboden on Persian and Hebrew translations of the novella, Brandon Hurst on romantic irony, John Bryant on the arts and fluid text editing of Billy Budd, Wyn Kelley on influence study, John Wenke on Hayford-Sealts, Lenora Warren on Melville’s radical humanity, and Edouard Marsoin on the futures of Billy Budd. It also includes a series of prose poems in the form of pandemic letters to Melville by Chris Huntington, a review by Robert Tally of David Greven’s All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence, an “All Astir” column by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, a Bezanson Fellow’s Report by Christopher Bates, further investigations into Mocha Dick’s legend by Michele Martini, and a note on Melville at Sweeny’s in New York by James M. Lundberg.