Melville

Melville PDF Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030783171X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
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.

Melville

Melville PDF Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030783171X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801881862
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1070

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Book Description
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.

Melville Biography

Melville Biography PDF Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810127091
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
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.

Herman Melville: 1851-1891

Herman Melville: 1851-1891 PDF Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801868924
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1072

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Book Description
Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. Illustrations.

Melville and His Circle

Melville and His Circle PDF Author: William B. Dillingham
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332720
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
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.

Melville: A Novel

Melville: A Novel PDF Author: Jean Giono
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371375
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Originally published to promote his French translation of Moby-Dick, Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel is an astonishing literary compound of fiction, biography, personal essay, and criticism. In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece. Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essay, Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle. Paul Eprile was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation's 2018 Translation Prize for his translation of Melville.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: Elizabeth Hardwick
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The complex author of the quintessential American masterpiece is demystified by a leading contemporary critic. Hardwick's novelistic flair reveals a former whaleship deck-hand whose voyages were the stuff of travel romances that seduced the public.

The Value of Herman Melville

The Value of Herman Melville PDF Author: Geoffrey Sanborn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This book explores the writings of Herman Melville across his career and examines the distinctive qualities of his style.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780238665
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Herman Melville is hailed as one of the greats—if not the greatest—of American literature. Born in New York in 1819, he first achieved recognition for his daring stylistic innovations, but it was Moby-Dick that would win him global fame. In this new critical biography, Kevin J. Hayes surveys Melville’s major works and sheds new light on the writer’s unpredictable professional and personal life. Hayes opens the book with an exploration of the revival of interest in Melville’s work thirty years after his death, which coincided with the aftermath of World War I and the rise of modernism. He goes on to examine the composition and reception of Melville’s works, including his first two books, Typee and Omoo, and the novels, short fiction, and poetry he wrote during the forty years after the publication of Moby-Dick. Incorporating a wealth of new information about Melville’s life and the times in which he lived, the book is a concise and engaging introduction to the life of a celebrated but often misunderstood writer.

Melville

Melville PDF Author: Laurie Robertson-Lorant
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558491458
Category : Novelists, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Drawing on more than five hundred newly discovered letters, this book immerses the reader in the often turbulent world of Herman Melville, from his childhood to his seafaring days, to his often frustrating career as a writer. With energetic prose and an unerring eye for psychological nuance, Laurie Robertson-Lorant explores the forces that shaped the man: the women and children in his life, his enigmatic relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the psychosexual tensions that informed his art, his struggles against debt, his disappointment about failing to win a popular audience for his more serious work, and the alcoholism and violence that plagued his family. Melville is an account of one of America's preeminent literary geniuses.