ABSTRACT
Moby-Dick has entered popular culture as an idiom recognized globally, especially as the novel itself represents the epitome of U.S. literary culture as an exemplary, canonical work. It is remarkable that a novel so concerned with the transnationalism of 19th-century commercial whaling, that sets 114 of its 135 chapters and epilogue outside the geopolitical borders of the U.S., whose crew is drawn from the far corners of the earth, and whose climactic, tragic action occurs northwest of New Guinea in the open waters of the Pacific should be considered the quintessential ‘American novel.’
