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This unique introduction explores Herman Melville as he described himself in Billy Budd-"a writer whom few know." Moving beyond the recurring depiction of Melville as the famous author of Moby-Dick, this book traces his development as a writer while providing the basic tools for successful critical reading of his novels. Offers a brief introduction to Melville, covering all his major works Showcases Melville's writing process through his correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne Provides a clear sense of Melville's major themes and preoccupations Focuses on Typee, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd in individual chapters Includes a biography, summary of key works, interpretation, commentary, and an extensive bibliography.
She shows that images both from Melville and from popular sources of the time represented New York variously as Capital, Labyrinth, City of Man, and City of God, and she goes on to demonstrate that he resisted a generalizing or totalizing representation of the city by revealing its hybrid identity and giving voice to the poor, the displaced, and the racially excluded.
The present volume analyzes the political project manifested in the narrative poem by Melville 'Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land'. Published in 1876, this work is centered on the necessities, the possibilities and the difficulties of intersubjectivity as a means to transcend the obstacles posed by individualism and traditional communities. Este volumen analiza el proyecto político del poema narrativo de Melville 'Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land', centrado en la necesidad, las posibilidades y las dificultades de la intersubjetividad para la superación de las barreras del individualismo y de comunidades tradicionales.
Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that...
Throughout his life, Melville lived surrounded by women, and he wove women's experiences into most of his literary work, early and late. The 12 essays in this collection extend the interest in Melville and women evident in recent scholarship, biography, art, and drama.
He explains when and where in Melville's wanderings throughout America, Europe, and the Near East he saw these works, then describes how Melville made use of the life and work of these artists in his own fiction and poetry. The collection includes new essays on Moby Dick and J.M.W. Turner; Melville's fascination with Dutch genre painting; his appropriation of work by Cole and Vanderlyn for his magazine fiction; his use of early representations of the plague in Israel Potter; the relationship between the satirical cartoons of Daumier and the figures of The Confidence-Man; Timoleon's many artistic subjects; and the power of classical icons to shape the moral and aesthetic conflicts in Billy Budd. Also found here are theoretical essays on Melville and the picturesque; the modernism of Melville's aesthetic vision; his "anti-architectural" theory of literature; and his extensive reading in art history and art theory, from the classical to his own period.
Melville’s Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza Tales—Herman Melville’s only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime—and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville’s stories. As Christopher Sten shows, all of the stories in The Piazza Tales present encounters between established white male figures: a writer, a lawyer, a ship captain, a homeowner, an architect, a world traveler, and characters who are outsiders, minorities, outcasts, or "others": a seamstress, an office drudge, enslaved Africans, a traveling salesman, island castaways, the poor. In each, Melville concentrate...
Yothers’ Sacred Uncertainty examines Melville’s engagement with religious difference, both within American culture and around the world. It is impossible to understand Melville’s wider engagement with religious and cultural questions, however, without understanding the fundamental tension between self and society, self and others that underlies his work, and that is manifested in particular in the way in which he interacts with other writers. There is almost certainly no more concrete or reliable way to get at Melville’s affirmations of and arguments with these interlocutors than in the markings and annotations that appear in his copies of many of their works, so Yothers examines Melville’s marginalia for clues to Melville’s thinking about self, other, and difference. Sacred Uncertainty provides a much needed exploration of Melville’s encounter with and reflection upon religious difference.
The English literary influence on classic American novelists’ depictions of gender, sexuality, and race With All the Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melville’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and James Fenimore Cooper’s uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. Greven limns the effect of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthorne’s exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melville’s evocation of “the step-mother world” of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors’ treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.
Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scho...