John Bryant

Publications, Awards, Blogs, and Presentations

JOHN BRYANT earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1975 and retired as a full professor from Hofstra University in 2015. His scholarly work has focused on the nineteenth century in American literature, and particularly on Herman Melville. He taught as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universities of Genoa and Turin, in 1977-78, and at the University of Rome (Sapienza) in 2014 and was a keynoter and seminar leader at the Orientale American Studies International School (OASIS), sponsored by Università degli Studi di Napoli (Orientale) in Procida, Italy, in 2014 and 2016. He has published widely in Melville and Nineteenth Century American studies, has developed a theory of adaptation and editing known as fluid text, and has broken new ground in digital humanities.


BOOKS

  • Herman Melville: A Half Known Life. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

Volume 1. Eternal Ifs: Infant, Boy, and Man (1819-1840), 2021. xv, 1-634.

Volume 2. Melville at Sea (1840-1846), 2021. 637-1256, index.

Volume 3. A Writer Writing (1846-1891), forthcoming.

  • Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee. A Fluid Text Analysis, with an Edition of the Typee Manuscript. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

  • The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 312 pp. In Polish: Płynny Tekst, trans. Łukasz Cybulski, 2021.

  • Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 313 pp.

  • Melville Dissertations, 1924-1980: An Annotated Bibliography and Subject Index. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. 167 pp. Indices.


EDITIONS IN PRINT

  • “Billy Budd, Sailor. (An inside narrative.),” ed. John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Ohge. In Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Robert S. Levine. Norton, 2021.

  • Moby-Dick. A Longman Critical Edition. Ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer. New York: Longman, 2006. [A fluid text edition.]

  • The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville. Modern Library. Random House, 2003.

  • Melville’s Tales, Poems, and Other Writings. Modern Library. Random House, 2001.

  • Typee, by Herman Melville. New York: Penguin American Classics, 1996; rev. 2005.

EDITIONS ONLINE


PERSONAL ESSAYS on Life and Travel

  • “Once Was Lost.” In Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy. Ed. Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2011. Pp. 100-9.

  • Blog: A Second Chance at Rome: Teaching, Writing, and Following Melville. [Entries retrace Melville’s 30- day tour of Rome in 1857] http://engjlb.wordpress.com/

  • Blog. Melville, the Morgan, and Me: My First Day at Sea. [Entries recount a night and two days on the whaling vessel Charles W. Morgan, the restored sister ship of Melville’s vessel Acushnet] http://misterstubb.wordpress.com/


ARTICLES ON MELVILLE

  • “How Billy Budd Grew Black and Beautiful: Versions of Melville in the Digital Age,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 16.1 (March 2014): 60-86.

  • “Wound, Beast, Revision: Versions of the Melville Meme.” In The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Robert S. Levine. 2nd ed.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 202-18.

  • “Rewriting Moby-Dick: Politics, Textual Identity, and the Revision Narrative,” PMLA 125.4 (October 2010): 1043-60.

  • “Moby-Dick as Revolution.” In The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 65-90. Rpt. in Harold Bloom, ed. Moby-Dick (Chelsea House, 2007).

  • “Melville Essays the Romance: Comedy and Being in Frankenstein, ‘The Big Bear of Arkansas,’ and Moby-Dick.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.3 (December 2006): 277-310.

  • “Taipi, Tipii, Typee: Place, Memory, and Text,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 51.1-3 (2005): 137- 68.

  • “Melville’s Rose Poems: As They Fell,” Arizona Quarterly 53.1 (Spring 1997): 49-84.

  • “Toning Down the Green: Melville’s Picturesque.” In Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts. Ed. Christopher Sten. Kent State University Press, 1991. Pp. 145-61.


FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, & AWARDS

  • 2016 Distinguished Editor Award. Council of Editors of Learned Journals. MLA Convention. Austin, TX. January 9, 2016.

  • 2016 President. The Melville Society. MLA Convention. Austin, TX. January 7, 2016

  • 2016 Distinguished Faculty Lecture. “Hofstra’s Digital Research Center: Tools for Building Scholarship in the Humanities.” Hofstra University. March 23, 2016.

  • 2014 NEH Scholarly Editions Grant, for MEL. For 2014-17. Project Director: Melville Electronic Library.

  • 2014 38th Voyager of the Charles W. Morgan. One of 80 national scholars, artists, and teachers chosen to sail a night and day leg of the restored whaling vessel’s sail June-July, 2014.

  • 2014 Fulbright Fellowship. University of Rome (Roma Uno: “La Sapienza”).

  • 2011 NEH Scholarly Editions Grant, for MEL. For 2011-14. Project Director: Melville Electronic Library.

  • 2009 NEH Scholarly Editions Grant, for MEL. For 2009-11. Project Director: Melville Electronic Library. 2009 MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions Seal of Approval, for Herman Melville’s Typee.

  • 2008 NEH Digital Start-Up Grant, for MEL. For 2008-09. Project Director: “Melville, Revision, and Collaborative Editing: Toward a Critical Archive.”

  • 2000 CELJ Best New Journal (runner-up) 2000 for Leviathan. Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Awarded 27 December, 2000. MLA Convention. Washington DC.

  • 1995 NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers. Director of Project: “Melville’s Typee and Moby-Dick: The Growth of an Artist.”

  • 1993 NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers. Director of Project: “Melville’s Typee and Moby-Dick: The Growth of an Artist.”



Presentations