Empire of Nature / Nation of Progress. Israel in Exile and Melville’s Critique of Historical Consciousness

No longer a “stepchild” among Melville’s novels, Israel Potter (1855) may be read as a radical, if not “his most radical work.” By rewriting the life of a forsaken hero of the American Revolution, Melville struck at the heart of “the romantic dilemma” of American nationalism: how to account for a country invoked as the free “empire of nature” and the “nation of human progress” at the same time. Israel Potter was Melville’s adversarial response to the paradox ‒ the re-presentation of an American exile deprived of his identity and his future, disowned by his country, and bewildered by a native land increasingly defaced by environmental alteration.