Herman Melville's Moby Dick was published in 1851 to little acclaim. His great novel exploring the themes of good and evil, racial intolerance, and our relationship to nature was so offensive to contemporary readers that they refused to buy it. Discover how Melville's experiences as a young seaman influenced his story, and how Moby Dick, itself, influenced scores of American writers.
In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and 'Bartleby' (worker exploitation or wage slavery), ....
A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (Historical Guides to American Authors)
Added by: huelgas | Karma: 1208.98 | Fiction literature | 30 January 2009
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This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.
This revision of Herman Melville A to Z (2001) is an addition to the publisher's Critical Companions series. Part 1 is a biography of Melville. Part 2 has entries on many of Melville's publications, including summaries and publication history, and for the more substantive works, critical commentary, entries on characters, and brief secondary bibliographies. The third section contains encyclopedic entries on people, places, publications, and events. The fourth section is made up of several appendixes: a chronology, a primary and secondary bibliography, selected contemporary reviews, selected letters between Melville and Hawthorne, and a genealogy extending from Melville's grandparents to his grandchildren.
