Evelev (English, U. of Missouri-Columbia) conducts a new reading of Melville, based upon the contexts of the decline of elite patronage and the rise of the new middlebrow literary market economy in antebellum New York. Evelev works through works from 1846's Tyree to 1852's Pierre to show how Melville responded to the sometimes violent changes in how art and entertainment worked together with middle-class ethos, especially in literature, and how the writer as artist met the writer as entertainer head-on. Evelev shows the influence of the Astor Place riots, which helped define high culture and popular culture and the lecture circuit, which helped to define how the writer was to market himself given the evolution of how attitudes toward mental labor followed attitudes about manual labor. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)