Download or read book Moby Dick and Melville s Anti Slavery Allegory written by Brian R. Pellar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Drawing on a rich variety of sources such as unpublished papers, letters, reviews, and family memorabilia, the chapters discuss the significance of these laws within Melville’s own life.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.
Download or read book Chasing the White Whale written by Jessica Slone and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Moby Dick written by Herman Melville and published by anboco. This book was released on 2016-05-04 with total page 757 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by Herman Melville considered an outstanding work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Ishmael narrates the monomaniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the twentieth century. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world", and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". "Call me Ishmael" is one of world literature's most famous opening sentences.
Download or read book Melville and the Idea of Blackness written by Christopher Freeburg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now written by Brian Yothers and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Empire of Necessity written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War written by Herman Melville and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1866 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Pretends to be Free written by Graham Russell Hodges and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1994 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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 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 Mocha Dick written by Jeremiah N. Reynolds and published by Sicpress.com. This book was released on 2013-04-06 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremiah N. Reynolds (1799-1858), an American newspaper editor, lecturer, explorer and author who became an influential advocate for scientific expeditions. Reynolds gathered first-hand observations of Mocha Dick, an albino sperm whale off Chile who bedeviled a generation of whalers for thirty years before succumbing to one. Mocha Dick survived many skirmishes (by some accounts at least 100) with whalers before he was eventually killed. In May 1839, The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine published Reynolds' "Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific," the inspiration for Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. In Reynolds' account, Mocha Dick was killed in 1838, after he appeared to come to the aid of a distraught cow whose calf had just been slain by the whalers. His body was 70 feet long and yielded 100 barrels of oil, along with some ambergris. He also had several harpoons in his body.
Download or read book White Bound written by Matthew Hughey and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of race are inevitably fraught with tension, both in opinion and positioning. Too frequently, debates are framed as clear points of opposition—us versus them. And when considering white racial identity, a split between progressive movements and a neoconservative backlash is all too frequently assumed. Taken at face value, it would seem that whites are splintering into antagonistic groups, with differing worldviews, values, and ideological stances. White Bound investigates these dividing lines, questioning the very notion of a fracturing whiteness, and in so doing offers a unique view of white racial identity. Matthew Hughey spent over a year attending the meetings, reading the literature, and interviewing members of two white organizations—a white nationalist group and a white antiracist group. Though he found immediate political differences, he observed surprising similarities. Both groups make meaning of whiteness through a reliance on similar racist and reactionary stories and worldviews. On the whole, this book puts abstract beliefs and theoretical projection about the supposed fracturing of whiteness into relief against the realities of two groups never before directly compared with this much breadth and depth. By examining the similarities and differences between seemingly antithetical white groups, we see not just the many ways of being white, but how these actors make meaning of whiteness in ways that collectively reproduce both white identity and, ultimately, white supremacy.
Download or read book E M Forster and Music written by Tsung-Han Tsai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the political resonances of E. M. Forster's representations of music, offering readings of canonical and overlooked works. It reveals music's crucial role in his writing and draws attention to a previously unacknowledged eclecticism and complexity in Forster's ideological outlook. Examining unobtrusive musical allusions in a variety of Forster's writings, this book demonstrates how music provided Forster with a means of reflecting on race and epistemology, material culture and colonialism, literary heritage and national character, hero-worship and war, and gender and professionalism. It unveils how Forster's musical representations are mediated through a matrix of ideas and debates of his time, such as those about evolution, empire, Britain's relationship with the Continent, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of musicology as an academic discipline.
Download or read book Melville s Epic of History written by Walt Darring and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the final chapter of Moby-Dick, the Pequod, rammed and crushed by the White Whale, circles slowly and sinks into the sea, drawing the crew into the vortex, down to their watery graves. Only one man lived to tell the tale, and the story he told has been acclaimed as the Modern Epic. Now, it takes place in a newly revealed and unexpected context, as the climax of Melville's Epic of History, which is the subject of this book"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Benito Cereno written by Herman Melville and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New World slavery. Narrating the story of a slave revolt using materials drawn from Amasa Delano’s non-fictional account of the Tryal Rebellion from earlier in the nineteenth century, Melville’s story probes the moral complexities of the antebellum United States and its position within the Americas. Melville explores the psychology of slavery and racism and the role of violence in both the resistance to, and the perpetuation of, slavery in the Americas. The appendices to this volume illustrate how Melville’s satirical treatment of racism and his ambivalent response to violent resistance to slavery connect with antislavery literature (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction alike) in the middle of the nineteenth century, and they also consider how “Benito Cereno” functions as a central piece in Melville’s contribution to the literature of the Americas.
Download or read book Criticism and the Color Line written by Henry B. Wonham and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume celebrates the hybridity of American literary culture. Over the last decade and more, American literary studies have tended, with only a few rare and recent exceptions, to look at separate strands of literary history and tradition--African American or white, male or female, lesbian or gay or straight. Every contributor to this collection, no matter how widely varied the point of view in other ways, examines the dynamic relationship between "mainstream" and African-American expressive traditions in American culture. Engaging the work of writers from Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Douglass to William Styron and Ernest Gaines, they concur in treating the color line as a site of cultural mutation where American identities are produced, not diluted, through acts of cultural exchange. The book draws new research into the rich, contentious, yet thoroughly pluralistic cultural equation that is American literature. Toni Morrison's ground-breaking lecture, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" opens the book, which then moves on to provocative essays by scholars who have heeded her call for a rethinking of American literary tradition, black and white.
Download or read book Melville written by Andrew Delbanco and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.
