Download or read book Melville s Intervisionary Network written by John Haydock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intervisionary Network explores a range of literary connections to reveal that Herman Melville was dependent on Honoré de Balzac's universal vision in more of his prose writing than previously recognized.
Download or read book Melville s Intervisionary Network written by John Haydock and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Intervisionary Network explores a range of these connections and reveals that Melville was dependent on Balzac and his universal vision in much of his prose writing.
Download or read book Herman Melville written by Corey Evan Thompson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-06-24 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 Freedom Beyond Confinement written by Michael Ra-Shon Hall and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.
Download or read book Of Reality written by Gianni Vattimo and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We think it is wise to accept reality, rather than fight for something that does not exist or might never be. But in Of Reality, Gianni Vattimo condemns this complacency, with its implicit support of the status quo. Instead he urges us to never stop questioning, contrasting, or overcoming reality, which is not natural, inevitable, or objective. Reality is a construct, reflecting, among other things, our greed, biases, and tendencies toward violence. It is no accident, Vattimo argues, that the call to embrace reality has emerged at a time when the inequalities of liberal capitalism are at their most extreme. Developed from his popular Gifford Lectures, this book advances a critical approach that recovers our interpretive powers and native skepticism toward normative claims. Though he recognizes his ideas invite charges of relativism, the philosopher counters with a discussion of truth, highlighting its longstanding ties to history and social circumstance. Truth is always contingent and provisional, and reason and reasonableness are bound to historical context. Truth is therefore never objective, and resistance to reality is our best hope to defeat the indifference that threatens the scope of freedom and democracy.
Download or read book Inscrutable Malice written by Jonathan A. Cook and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville's abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville's creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work. Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil, as dramatized in the book of Job; and the discourse of the Christian end-times involving the final destruction of evil, as found in the apocalyptic books and eschatological passages of the Old and New Testaments. With his detailed reading of Moby-Dick in relation to its most important source text, Cook greatly expands the reader's understanding of the moral, religious, and mythical dimensions of the novel. Both accessible and erudite, Inscrutable Malice will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Melville's classic whaling narrative.
Download or read book Visionary of the Word written by Brian Yothers and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-15 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary of the Word brings together the latest scholarship on Herman Melville’s treatment of religion across his long career as a writer of fiction and poetry. The volume suggests the broad range of Melville’s religious concerns, including his engagement with the denominational divisions of American Christianity, his dialogue with transatlantic currents in nineteenth-century religious thought, his consideration of theological and philosophical questions related to the problem of evil and determinism versus free will, and his representation of the global contact among differing faiths and cultures. These essays constitute a capacious response to the many avenues through which Melville interacted with religious faith, doubt, and secularization throughout his career, advancing our understanding of Melville as a visionary interpreter of religious experience who remains resonant in our own religiously complex era.
Download or read book The Melville Log written by Jay Leyda and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Piazza Tales written by Herman Melville and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Herman Melville written by Hershel Parker and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 1070 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.
Download or read book Call Me Ishmael written by Charles Olson and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-05 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences—especially Shakespearean ones—on Melville’s writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the “theory of the two Moby-Dicks,” Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville’s reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: “the first book did not contain Ahab,” writes Olson, and “it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick.” If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the “theory of the two Moby-Dicks,” it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy. Passionate in his poetry, Olson was no less passionate in his reading of Melville. Impatient with what he regarded as traditional forms of literary criticism, Olson engaged his own creativity to write a book as robust, original, and compelling as Melville’s masterpiece. “Not only important, but apocalyptic.”—New York Herald Tribune “One of the most stimulating essays ever written on Moby-Dick, and for that matter on any piece of literature, and the forces behind it.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Olson has been a tireless student of Melville and every Melville lover owes him a debt for his Scotland Yard pertinacity in getting on the trail of Melville’s dispersed library.”—Lewis Mumford, New York Times “Records, often brilliantly, one way of taking the most extraordinary of American books.”—W. E. Bezanson, New England Quarterly “The most important contribution to Melville criticism since Raymond Weaver’s pioneering contribution in 1921.”—George Mayberry, New Republic
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Question of Theory written by Geoffrey H. Hartman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theoretical ferment which has affected literary studies over the last decade has called into question traditional ways of thinking about, classifying and interpreting texts. Shakespeare has been not just the focus of a variety of divergent critical movements within recent years, but also increasingly the locus of emerging debates within, and with, theory itself. This collection of essays, written by distinguished and powerful critics in the fields of literary theory and Shakespeare studies, is intended both for those interested in Shakespeare and for those interested more generally in the emerging debates within contemporary criticism and theory.
Download or read book The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance written by Leon Chai and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance illuminates the process by which the cultural legacy of European Romanticism was assimilated by and transformed in the literature of mid-nineteenth-century America. Leon Chai traces the development various governing concepts or tendencies from their genesis in British, French, and German Romantic traditions through their subsequent appropriation by such American writers as Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. Among the topics he addresses are the shift from allegory to symbolism; selected trends in Romantic science; the secularization of religion; the emergence of a historical consciousness and a philosophy of history; pantheism; the relation of subjectivity to objectivity in Romantic philosophy; and Romantic poets.
Download or read book Melville and His Circle written by William B. Dillingham and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Melville is a towering figure in American literature--arguably the country's greatest nineteenth-century writer. Revising a number of entrenched misunderstandings about Melville in his later years, this is a remarkable and unprecedented account of the aged author giving himself over to a life of the mind. Focusing exclusively on a period usually associated with the waning of Melville's literary powers, William B. Dillingham shows that he was actually concentrating and intensifying his thoughts on art and creativity to a greater degree than ever before. Biographers have written little about Melville's deceptively "quiet" years after the publication of the long poem Clarel in 1876 and before his death in 1891. It was a time when he saw few friends or acquaintances, answered most of his letters as briefly as possible, and declined most social invitations. But for Melville, as for Emily Dickinson, such outward appearances belied an intense, engaged inner life. If for no other reason, Dillingham reminds us, this period merits more discerning attention because it was then that Melville produced Billy Budd as well as an impressive number of new and revised poems--while working full-time as a customs inspector for more than half of those years. What sustained Melville during that final period of ill health and near-poverty, says Dillingham, was his "circle," not of close friends but of works by a number of writers that he read with appreciative, yet discriminating, affinity, including Matthew Arnold, James Thomson, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Honore de Balzac. Dillingham relates these readings to Melville's own poetry and prose and to a rich variety of largely underappreciated topics relevant to Melville's later life, from Buddhism, the School of Pessimism, and New York intellectual life to Melville's job at the ever-corrupt customs house, his fear of disgrace and increased self-absorption, and his engagement with both the picturesque and the metaphorical power of roses in art and literature. This portrait of the great writer's final years is at once a biography, an intellectual history, and a discerning reading of his mature work. By showing that Melville's isolation was a conscious intellectual decision rather than a psychological quirk, Melville and His Circle reveals much that is new and challenging about Melville himself and about our notions of age and the persistence of imagination and creativity.
Download or read book The Faith of the Faithless written by Simon Critchley and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The return to religion has perhaps become the dominant cliché of contemporary theory, which rarely offers anything more than an exaggerated echo of a political reality dominated by religious war. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict. The Faith of the Faithless asks how we might respond. Following Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding, this new book builds on its philosophical and political framework, also venturing into the questions of faith, love, religion and violence. Should we defend a version of secularism and quietly accept the slide into a form of theism—or is there another way? From Rousseau’s politics and religion to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Žižek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence, and the limits of non-violence.
Download or read book Sailor Talk written by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the highly engaging topic of the literary and cultural significance of ‘sailor talk.’ The central argument is that sailor talk offers a way of rethinking the figure of the nineteenth-century sailor and sailor-writer, whose language articulated the rich, layered, and complex culture of sailors in port and at sea. From this argument many other compelling threads emerge, including questions relating to the seafarer’s multifaceted identity, maritime labor, questions of performativity, the ship as ‘theater,’ the varied and multiple registers of ‘sailor talk,’ and the foundational role of maritime language in the lives and works of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Jack London. The book also includes nods to James Fenimore Cooper, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Meticulous scholarly research underpins the close readings of literary texts and the scrupulously detailed biographical accounts of three major sailor-writers. The author’s own lived experience as a seafarer adds a refreshingly materialist dimension to the subtle literary readings. The book represents a valuable addition to a growing scholarly and political interest in the sea and sea literature. By taking the sailor’s viewpoint and listening to sailors’ voices, the book also marks a clear intervention in this developing field.
Download or read book The Room Between Us written by Denise Saul and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-16 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2023 Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022 A PBS Recommendation Summer 2022 In her debut collection, Denise Saul explores family and identity as she tells the story of a mother’s illness and subsequent aphasia, and a daughter's ongoing role as carer. At the heart of their relationship is an awareness of the inadequacies of language to name painful experiences as together they start to know the world afresh. Deeply affecting, the book finds a space for both the extraordinary and the ordinary, balancing all that is between. Such betweenness creates a space to explore wider dynamics of power, and the epiphanies and aftershocks of ongoing loss.
