"For years critics have viewed Herman Melville's Captain Ahab as the paradigm of a strong, controlling agent. Farmer and Schroeder's volume aims to rethink Ahab through a series of "materialist" frames, including posthumanism, disability studies, affect theory, animal studies, environmental humanities, systems theory, and oceanic studies. The essays here recast Ahab as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment--by chemistry, electromagnetism,...