front cover of Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Among the Magazines
Graham Thompson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write "the other way," working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the combined sales of his most well known novels, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man.

In Herman Melville Graham Thompson examines the author's magazine work in its original publication context, including stories that became classics, such as "Bartelby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno," alongside lesser-known work. Using a concept he calls "embedded authorship," Thompson explores what it meant to be a magazine writer in the 1850s and discovers a new Melville enmeshed with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions. He reveals how Melville responded to the practical demands of magazine writing with dazzling displays of innovation that reinvented magazine traditions and helped create the modern short story.
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front cover of Male Sexuality under Surveillance
Male Sexuality under Surveillance
Office In American Literature
Graham Thompson
University of Iowa Press, 2003
Male Sexuality under Surveillance is a lively, intelligent, and expertly argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office. Graham Thompson interweaves three main threads: a historicized cultural analysis of the development of the modern business office from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present day, a Foucauldian discussion of the office as the site of various disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical discussion of the textualization of the gay male body as a device for producing a taxonomy of male-male relations. The combination of these themes produces a study that is fresh, insightful, and provocative.
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