Download or read book Exiled Royalties written by Robert Milder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. Conceived separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, the ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life,'" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. Four of the ten essays deal with Melville's life and work after his novelistic career ended with the The Confidence-Man in 1857. The range of issues addressed in the essays includes Melville's attitudes toward society, history, and politics, from broad ideas about democracy and the course of Western civilization to responses to particular events like the Astor Place Riots and the Civil War; his feeling about sexuality and, throughout the book, about religion; his relationship to past and present writers, especially to the phases of Euro-American Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nascent Modernism; his relationship to his wife, Lizzie, to Hawthorne, and to his father, all of whom figured in the crisis that made for Pierre. The title essay, "Exiled Royalties," takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab"--Melville's mythic projection of a "larger, darker, deeper part" of himself. How to live nobly in spiritual exile--to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God--was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. The ways in which this impulse expressed itself through Melville's forty-five year career, interweaving itself with his personal life and the life of the nation and shaping both the matter and manner of his work, is the unifying subject of Exiled Royalties.
Download or read book Exiled Royalties written by Robert Milder and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This literary/biographical study of Melville contains ten essays which focus on his spiritual, psychological and vocational life. There are new readings of the often debated relationship between Melville and Hawthorne and other issues addressed include his attitude to religion and sexuality.
Download or read book Melville Biography written by Hershel Parker and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimizing his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the "divine amateurs" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists written by Timothy Parrish and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.
Download or read book Herman Melville in Context written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Melville in Context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the multifaceted life and times of Herman Melville, a towering figure in nineteenth-century American and world literature. The book grounds the study of Herman Melville's writings to the world that influenced their composition, publication and recognition, making it a valuable resource to scholars, teachers, students and general readers. Bringing together contributions covering a wide range of topics, the collection of essays covers the geographical, social, cultural and literary contexts of Melville's life and works, as well as its literary reception. Herman Melville in Context will enable readers to approach Melville's writings with fuller insight, and to read and understand them in a way that approximates the way they were read and understood in his time.
Download or read book Alcohol in the Writings of Herman Melville written by Corey Evan Thompson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early to mid-19th century America, there were growing debates concerning the social acceptability of alcohol and its consumption. Temperance reformers publicly decried the evils of liquor, and America's greatest authors began to write works of temperance fiction, stories that urged Americans to refrain from imbibing. Herman Melville was born in an era when drunkenness was part of daily life for American men but came of age at a time when the temperance movement had gained social and literary momentum. This first full-length analysis of alcohol and intoxication in Melville's novels, short fiction and poetry shows how he entered the debate in the latter half of the 19th century. Throughout his work he cautions readers to avoid alcohol and consistently illustrates negative outcomes of drinking.
Download or read book One Foot in the Finite written by K. L. Evans and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One Foot in the Finite inspires a radical shift in our view of Melville’s project in Moby-Dick, for its guiding notion is that Melville uses his book to call into question the naturalism that distinguishes the early modern period in Europe. Naturalism is not only the idea that reality is exhausted by nature, or that there exists a domain of physical entities subject to autonomous laws and unaffected by human ingenuity; it also implies a counterpart, a world of pretense and deception, a domain of mental entities ontologically distinct from physical entities and therefore constituting a different realm. To naturalists, whales are part of the background of existing objects against which man assembles his various, subjective, rather arbitrary interpretations. But in Moby-Dick Melville casts upon the world a more ingenious eye, one free of the dualist veil. He confronts a basic misconception: that the contents of consciousness comprise a different order from physical life. He rubs out the dividing line modernity has drawn between the human world of names or concepts and the nonhuman world of plants, creatures, geological features, and natural forces. Melville’s philosophizing, carried by fiction, has dramatic consequence. It overturns our view of language as a system of mental representations that might turn out to represent falsely.
Download or read book A Political Companion to Herman Melville written by Jason Frank and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force -- not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled contributions that interpret a number of political, cultural, and religious aspects of the transatlantic relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors discuss a variety of subjects, including European colonization, travel accounts of southerners visiting Europe, and the experiences of German immigrants who settled in the South. The collection also examines slavery, foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign government, the lynching of African Americans and Italian immigrants, and transatlantic religious fundamentalism. Finally, it addresses international perceptions of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement as a framework for understanding race relations in the United Kingdom after World War II. Featuring contributions from leading scholars based in the United States and Europe, this illuminating volume explores the South from an international perspective and offers a new context from which to consider the region's history.
Download or read book Great Shakespeareans Set I written by Peter Holland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 1078 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. This major project offers an unprecedented scholarly analysis of the contribution made by the most important Shakespearean critics, editors, actors and directors as well as novelists, poets, composers, and thinkers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Great Shakespeareans will be an essential resource for students and scholars in Shakespeare studies.
Download or read book Bloom s how to Write about Herman Melville written by Laurie A. Sterling and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he spent much of his career in obscurity, Herman Melville, the author of classics such as ""Moby-Dick"", ""Billy Budd"", and ""Bartleby, the Scrivener,"" has since become known as one of America's greatest writers. ""How to Write about Herman Melville"" offers valuable paper-topic suggestions, clearly outlined strategies on how to write a strong essay, and an insightful introduction by Harold Bloom on writing about Melville. This new volume is designed to help students develop their analytical writing skills and critical comprehension of the author and his major works.
Download or read book Melville s Philosophies written by Branka Arsic and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melville's Philosophies departs from a long tradition of critical assessments of Melville that dismissed his philosophical capacities as ingenious but muddled. Its contributors do not apply philosophy to Melville in order to detect just how much of it he knew or understood. To the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves-often very strange and quite radical-that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. What emerges is a Melville who is materialistically oriented in a radical way, a Melville who thinks about life forms not just in the context of contemporary sciences but also ontologically. Melville's Philosophies recovers a Melville who is a thinker of great caliber, which means obliquely but dramatically reversing the way the critical tradition has characterized his ideas. Finally, as a result of the readings collected here, Melville emerges as a very relevant thinker for contemporary philosophical concerns, such as the materialist turn, climate change, and post-humanism.
Download or read book Herman Melville written by Wyn Kelley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Herman Melville written by Corey Evan Thompson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Melville s Mirrors written by Brian Yothers and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.
Download or read book Human Rights and the Uses of History written by Samuel Moyn and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War, has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of reflective and critical studies, Samuel Moyn engages with some of the leading interpreters of human rights, thinkers who have been creating a field from scratch without due reflection on the local and temporal contexts of the stories they are telling. Having staked out his owns claims about the postwar origins of human rights discourse in his acclaimed Last Utopia, Moyn, in this volume, takes issue with rival conceptions—including, especially, those that underlie justifications of humanitarian intervention
Download or read book Chasing the White Whale written by David Dowling and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-11-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There have been a lot of crazy books about Melville and Moby-Dickiut this isn't one of them. Dowling's overarching analogy, between Ishmael's and Melville's obsessions and the annual marathon group-reading of Moby-Dick in New Bedford, makes perfect sense and generates illuminating analyses of the novel and its cultural contexts. It also lets him open his book up into a passionate exploration of how great literature can still play a vital role in people's lives today"-Damion Searls, editor, Thoreau's The Journal: 1837-1861 and Melville's; or The Whale --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Neither Believer nor Infidel written by Jonathan A. Cook and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shedding new light on both classic and lesser-known works in the Melville canon with particular attention to the author's literary use of the Bible, Neither Believer Nor Infidel examines the debate between religious skepticism and Christian faith that infused Herman Melville's writings following Moby-Dick. Jonathan A. Cook's study is the first to focus on the decisive role of faith and doubt in Melville's writings following his mid-career turn to shorter fiction, and still later to poetry, as a result of the commercial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre. Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that Melville "can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief," a remark that encapsulates an essential truth about Melville's attitude to Christianity. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Melville spent his literary career poised between an intellectual rejection of Christian dogma and an emotional attachment to the consolations of non-dogmatic Christian faith. Accompanying this ambivalence was a lifelong devotion to the text of the King James Bible as both moral sourcebook and literary template. Following a biographical overview of skeptical influences and manifestations in Melville's early life and career, Cook examines the evidence of religious doubt and belief in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!," "The Encantadas," Israel Potter, Battle-Pieces, Timoleon, and Billy Budd. Accessible for both the general reader and the scholar, Neither Believer Nor Infidel clarifies the ambiguities of Melville's pervasive use of religion in his fiction and poetry. In analyzing Melville's persistent oscillation between metaphysical rebellion and attenuated belief, Cook elucidates both well-known and under-appreciated works.
