Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory
Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory

Author: Brian R. Pellar

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-06-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3319522671

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This book unfurls and examines the anti-slavery allegory at the subtextual core of Herman Melville’s famed novel, Moby-Dick. Brian Pellar points to symbols and allusions in the novel such as the albinism of the famed whale, the “Ship of State” motif, Calhoun’s “cords,” the equator, Jonah, Narcissus, St. Paul, and Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan. The work contextualizes these devices within a historical discussion of the Compromise of 1850 and subsequently strengthened Fugitive Slave Laws. Drawing on a rich variety of sources such as unpublished papers, letters, reviews, and family memorabilia, the chapters discuss the significance of these laws within Melville’s own life. After clarifying the hidden allegory interconnecting black slaves and black whales, this book carefully sheds the layers of a hidden meaning that will be too convincing to ignore for future readings: Moby-Dick is ultimately a novel that is intimately connected with questions of race, slavery, and the state.

Chasing the White Whale
Chasing the White Whale

Author: Jessica Slone

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 9781124677699

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The work of Herman Melville has been explored by hundreds of scholars in the hopes of supporting a variety of claims. Until recent decades, the concept of slavery was applied only to works such as Benito Cereno and White-Jacket . However, in the midst of these studies sits Melville's largest accomplishment: Moby-Dick . Although that novel has been studied in depth by many, few have recognized the intricately constructed, carefully disguised slavery metaphor it conceals. This study offers a deeper understanding of Moby-Dick by relating its text to Herman Melville's unique position in relation to the nation's anti-slavery controversy, culminating in a discussion of the "fast-fish, loose-fish" concept, its importance to the whaling community, as well as its connection to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Combining these ideas, this project highlights not only the strength of Melville's anti-slavery feeling, but his innate ability to both craft and protect his message.

Moby Dick
Moby Dick

Author: Herman Melville

Publisher: ABDO

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 1616411635

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In Herman Melville's classic tale of revenge, Ishmael tells his story of becoming a whaler on the Pequod. When Ishmael and his unexpected friend Queequeg join Captain Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick, the voyage of a lifetime turns into tragedy. The adventures of sailing the seas on the hunt for the great white whale is retold in the Calico Illustrated Classics adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick. Calico Chapter Books is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO Group. Grades 3-8.

Melville and the Idea of Blackness
Melville and the Idea of Blackness

Author: Christopher Freeburg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1139536729

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By examining the unique problems that 'blackness' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Encantadas', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and US colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.

Melville's Mirrors
Melville's Mirrors

Author: Brian Yothers

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1640140530

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An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

Author: Herman Melville

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 1866

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is the first book of poetry published by American author Herman Melville. The volume is dedicated "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Country" and its 72 poems deal with the battles and personalities of the American Civil War and their aftermath. Critics at the time were at best respectful and often sharply critical of Melville's unorthodox style. The book had sold only 486 copies by 1868 and recovered barely half of its publications costs.[1] Not until the latter half of the twentieth century did Battle-Pieces become regarded as one of the most important group of poems on the American Civil War.

The Empire of Necessity
The Empire of Necessity

Author: Greg Grandin

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1429943173

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From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

A New Companion to Herman Melville
A New Companion to Herman Melville

Author: Wyn Kelley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-08-29

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 1119668506

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Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hem­ispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Herman Melville
Herman Melville

Author: Corey Evan Thompson

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1476642710

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This reference work covers both Herman Melville's life and writings. It includes a biography and detailed information on his works, on the important themes contained therein, and on the significant people and places in his life. The appendices include suggestions for further reading of both literary and cultural criticism, an essay on Melville's lasting cultural influence, and information on both the fictional ships in his works and the real-life ones on which he sailed.

Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now
Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now

Author: Brian Yothers

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-06-20

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1640140697

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This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today. Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.