Herman Melville (1819 – 1891) was an American poet and novelist of the American Renaissance, best known for his allusive adventure novel “Moby-Dick.” Praised by critics of Britain and United States, “Billy Budd” is a highly symbolic poem about the tragic fate of a seaman forced to commit a crime. In the end, he has nothing left but to accept his fate and go to the execution of his own free will.
Explore two lively classic tales of adventure on the high seas with CliffsNotes Billy Budd & Typee, the study guide that can raise your insight as well as your test scores! Meet Billy Budd, the sailor that everyone likes . . . or do they? And then set sail through the wild side of the South Seas in Typee. You’ll be up to speed on all the plot details and more with in-depth character analysis, critical essays, and insight into the novel's literary devices. You'll also discover background information on the life of Herman Melville and his place in American literature.
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.
Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions. But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions. This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
Looks at the central importance of the homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy in the Western culture of the last century, in particular by a series of provocative readings of Melville, Wilde, James and Proust. A book of both political and literary importance.
A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review
Sanger Rainsford is a big-game hunter, who finds himself washed up on an island owned by the eccentric General Zaroff. Zaroff, a big-game hunter himself, has heard of Rainsford’s abilities with a gun and organises a hunt. However, they’re not after animals – they’re after people. When he protests, Rainsford the hunter becomes Rainsford the hunted. Sharing similarities with "The Hunger Games", starring Jennifer Lawrence, this is the story that created the template for pitting man against man. Born in New York, Richard Connell (1893 – 1949) went on to become an acclaimed author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is best remembered for the gripping novel "The Most Dangerous Game" and for receiving an Oscar nomination for the screenplay "Meet John Doe".
The cruel power of misdirected words, artfully structured but spiritually empty and bearing the stamp of law or legalistic reasoning, is a persistent theme in the modern novel. Richard Weisberg, who has written extensively on both literature and law, explores the role of legalism and its abuses in eight major novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with Dostoevski and moving by way of trenchant analyses of Flaubert and Camus, Weisberg culminates his argument in a brilliantly revisionist reading of Melville's Billy Budd. In each of the novels treated, Weisberg sees a verbally gifted central character relying on wordiness to avoid or distort previously revealed truths. He argues that the malaise Nietzsche called ressentiment goads these characters to verbalizations that do violence to others and, ironically, indict their very creators. He identifies the legalistic theme as the major mode of iconoclasm in modern fiction and the source of its holocaustic vision. Writers, he reflects, viewed with profound skepticism their culture's tendency to substitute complex narrative formalism for earlier, absolute approaches to justice. In this, Weisberg concludes, their works anticipated the jurisprudential discourse of today. "The Failure of the Word is a creative, provocative, and learned work, written with style and feeling. Weisberg brings to bear on his core themes (the legalistic proclivity and ressentiment) a wide body of knowledge and thought in law and philosophy, literary history and theory."--Robert L. Jackson, Yale University
Call me Ishmael. I have set sail on a whaling ship to try my hand at whaling. But our captain has his own prey. We have been traveling the seas looking for the white whale, Moby Dick, who causes destruction wherever he swims. Will we survive a battle with the great whale? Find out in this stunning graphic novel adaptation of Herman Melville's classic by Rod Espinosa. Creator biographies and a glossary help reluctant readers take the first step on the road to classic literature.
