Melville

Melville PDF Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030783171X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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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 : 448

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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 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

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 in His Own Time

Melville in His Own Time PDF Author: Steven Olsen-Smith
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383338
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Owing to the decline of his contemporary fame and to decades of posthumous neglect, Herman Melville remains enigmatic to readers despite his status as one of America’s most securely canonical authors. Born into patrician wealth but plunged into poverty as a child, in 1840 he signed aboard the whaleship Acushnet in the midst of a nationwide depression and sailed to the South Pacific. At the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and lived for a time among one of the group’s last unsubjugated tribes. Upon his return home, he achieved overnight success with a book based on his experiences, Typee (1846). Melville’s mastery of the English language and heterodox views made him a source of both controversy and fascination to western readers, until his increasing commitment to artistry and contempt for artificial conventions led him to write Moby-Dick (1851) and its successor Pierre (1852). Although the former is considered his masterwork today, the books offended mid-nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities and alienated Melville from the American literary marketplace. The resulting eclipse of his popular reputation was deepened by his voluntary withdrawal from society, so that obituaries written after his death in 1891 frequently expressed surprise that he hadn’t died long before. With most of his personal papers and letters lost or destroyed, his library of marked and annotated books dispersed, and first-hand accounts of him scattered, brief, and frequently conflicting, Melville’s place in American literary scholarship illustrates the importance of accurately edited documents and the value of new information to our understanding of his life and thought. As a chronologically organized collection of surviving testimonials about the author, Melville in His Own Time continues the tradition of documentary research well-exemplified over the past half-century by the work of Jay Leyda, Merton M. Sealts, and Hershel Parker. Combining recently discovered evidence with new transcriptions of long-known but rarely consulted testimony, this collection offers the most up-to-date and correct record of commentary on Melville by individuals who knew him.

Melville: A Novel

Melville: A Novel PDF Author: Jean Giono
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371383
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: 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.

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

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.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: John Bryant
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119072697
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1392

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Book Description
A comprehensive exploration of Melville’s formative years, providing a new biographical foundation for today’s generations of Melville readers Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2, follows Herman Melville’s life from early childhood to his astonishing emergence as a bestselling novelist with the publication of Typee in 1846. These volumes comprise the first half of a comprehensive biography on Melville, grounded in archival research, new scholarship, and incisive critical readings. Author John Bryant, a distinguished Melville scholar, editor, critic, and educator, traces the events and experiences that shaped the many-stranded consciousness of one of literature’s greatest writers. This in-depth and innovative biography covers Melville’s family history and literary friendships, his father-longing, god-hunger, and search for the hidden nature of Being, the genesis of his liberal politics, his empathy for African Americans, Native Americans, Polynesians, South Americans, and immigrants. Original perspectives on Melville’s earliest identities—orphaned son, sibling, farmer, teacher, debater, lover, actor, sailor—provide the context for Melville’s evolution as a writer. The biography presents new information regarding Melville’s reading, his early orations and acting experience, his life at sea and on the road, and the unsettling death of his older, rival brother from mercury poisoning. It provides insights on experiences such as Melville’s trauma at the loss of his father, his learning to write amidst a coterie siblings, his struggles to find work during economic depression, his journey West, his life in whaling and in the navy, and his vagabondage in the South Pacific during the moment of American and European imperial incursions. A significant addition to Melville scholarship, this important biographical work: Explores the nature and development of Melville’s creative consciousness, through the lens of his revisions in manuscript and print Assesses Melville’s sexual growth and exploration of the spectrum of his masculinities Highlights Melville’s relevance in contemporary democratic society Discusses Melville’s blending of dark humor and tragedy in his unique version of the picturesque Examines the ‘replaying’ of Melville’s life traumas throughout his entire works, from Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to his shorter works, including “Bartleby,” his epic Clarel, his poetry, and his last novella Billy Budd Covers such cultural and historical events as the American revolution of his grandparents, the whaling industry, New York slavery, street life and theater in Manhattan, the transatlantic slave trade, the Jacksonian economy, Indian removal, Pacific colonialism, and westward expansion Written in an engaging style for scholars and general readers alike, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2 is an indispensable new source of information and insights for those interested in Melville, 19th-century and modern literature and culture, and readers of general American history and literary culture.

Herman Melville: 1819-1851

Herman Melville: 1819-1851 PDF Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801854286
Category : Novelists, American
Languages : en
Pages : 1014

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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.