‘Till we stand on the summit of yonder mountain’: literary geography and re-mapping place in Melville’s Typee

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between literary geography and the reconstruction of transnational places in Herman Melville’s Typee, originally published in 1846. This year of publication characterises the increasing American movement towards understanding exotic places and their cultural reflections on American society. Typee typifies this serious American identification with alien places as it is heavily devoted to the description of an American seafarer’s adventure on the island of Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands, an adventure which is believed to be partially based on Melville’s voyages in the Pacific Ocean. The article, however, is concerned with the geographic language of Melville’s narrator as it seeks to explain how the physical experiences of Typee’s narrator such as sightseeing, walking and escaping from the Island’s natives re-create a direct cultural mode of communication with the American public which departs from the old discourse of colonial maps. Notions of the American self and its spatial national identity must be reconsidered through the re-mapping of other distant places beyond the imaginative configurations of the American public. The article, thus, aims at decolonising the traditional meaning of maps that have always been geographically misrepresented for the cultural demarcation of the American identity.