{"product_id":"ambient-life-branka-arsic-9781517920869","title":"Ambient Life: Melville and the Ethereal Enlightenment","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRethinking the human through Melville's encounters with oceans, ecologies, and non-Western cosmologies\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmbient Life\u003c\/i\u003e offers a bold reimagining of Herman Melville's writing through the lens of ecology. Renowned literary critic Branka Arsic reframes Melville not just as a novelist but as an environmental thinker--one who reoriented the terms of human identity, perception, and relation. Rather than treating Melville's texts as separate literary objects, Arsic gathers them collectively to stage a philosophical meeting between Western Enlightenment epistemologies and the cosmologies of Polynesian and African traditions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eAmbient Life, \u003c\/i\u003eMelville's thinking becomes a site where vegetal, animal, and elemental images dissolve the distinction between inner life and outer world, yielding a radically relational form of individuation. Showing how Melville envisioned the human body not as a bounded, rational mind-container but as a porous, sensing organ infused with its surroundings, Arsic presents the mind as ambient rather than internal--a \"coral psyche\" shaped by atmospheric, aesthetic, and affective entanglements. Drawing from rich historical archives and ethnographic narratives, Arsic's archipelagic method mirrors this fluidity, traveling across oceans and epistemes to map a mode of thought.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePushing the boundaries of scholarly form and content, \u003ci\u003eAmbient Life\u003c\/i\u003e is a resonant meditation on the unstable boundaries of the self that positions Melville as a witness to the ecological precarity of our time--and an unwitting ancestor of posthumanist thought.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eRetail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and\/or extended descriptions.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Branka Arsic\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1517920868\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781517920869\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Minnesota Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/16\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 496\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.43lbs","brand":"Branka Arsic","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48659684098303,"sku":"9781517920869","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/ambient-life-branka-arsic-9781517920869","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}