“Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory”: Melville, Media and Narratives

Herman Melville’s birthday (On August 1, 1819) was a foreshadowing gesture of the present special issue, having come out of a long –somewhat protracted— collaboration, which coincides with the original publication of Moby-Dick: The Whale on October 18, 1851. The Journal of Narrative and Language Studies takes the opportunity to celebrate Melville’s resonating myth of the human being at the threshold of posthumanism, which explored the human psyche and mysterious potentials from dignity to evil, having been protracted for centuries but eventually led to oblivion. Since the time when he thoroughly, painstakingly, peculiarly created Moby-Dick” and crafted a world of consuming human desire that represents the universal human condition, readers, writers, and artists have been enormously inspired to envisage, fancy, create, design and produce verbal or nonverbal arts in the form of visual works or other means of imagination.