Author: Herman MelvillePublisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810105508
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 876
Book Description
The Piazza Tales
Author: Herman MelvillePublisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810105508
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 876
Book Description
The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860
Author: Herman MelvillePublisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810105519
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 859
Book Description
Included are two sea tales that encompass the essence of Melville's art: "Benito Cereno", an exhilarating account of mutiny and rescue aboard a disabled slave ship, which is a parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil, and "The Encantadas", ten allegorical sketches of the Galapagos Islands, which reveal nature to be both enchanting and horrifying. Two pieces explore themes of isolation and defeat found in Melville's great novels: "Bartelby, the Scrivener", a prophetically modern story of alienation and loss on nineteenth-century Wall Street, and "The Bell Tower", a Faustian tale about a Renaissance architect who brings about his own violent destruction. The other two works reveal Melville's mastery of very different writing styles: "The Lightning-Rod Man", a satire showcasing his talent for Dickensian comedy, and "The Piazza", the title story of the collection, which anticipates the author's later absorption with poetry.
The Writings: The piazza tales and other prose pieces, 1839-1860
Author: Herman MelvilleAmerican Hungers
Author: Gavin JonesPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
Melville's Wisdom
Author: Damien B. SchlarbPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197585566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
"This book explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Melville's work is an example of how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by contemporary theology. Damien Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical scepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace the acumen of modern analytical techniques such as higher biblical criticism, while salvaging simultaneously the spiritual authority of biblical language. Wisdom for Melville constitutes both object and analytical framework in this balancing act. Melville's Wisdom joins other works of postsecular literary studies in challenging its own discipline's constitutive secularization narrative by rethinking modern, putatively secular cultural formations in terms of their reciprocity with religious concepts and texts. Schlarb foregrounds Melville's sustained, career-spanning concern with biblical wisdom, its formal properties, and its knowledge-creating potential. By excavating this project from Melville's oeuvre, Melville's Wisdom shows how he seeks to avoid the spiritually corrosive effects of suspicious reading while celebrating truth-seeking over subversive iniquity"--
The Birth and Death of the Author
Author: Andrew J. PowerPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429859465
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 189
Book Description
The Birth and Death of the Author is a work about the changing nature of authorship as a concept. In eight specialist interventions by a diverse group of the finest international scholars it tells a history of print authorship in a set of author case studies from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. The introduction surveys the prehistory of print authorship and sets the historical and theoretical framework that opens the discussion for the seven succeeding chapters. Engaging particularly with the history of the materials and technology of authorship it places this in conversation with the critical history of the author up to and beyond the crisis of Barthes' 'Death of the Author'. As a multi-authored history of authorship itself, each subsequent chapter takes a single author or work from every century since the advent of print and focuses in on the relationship between the author and the reader. Thus they explore the complexities of the concept of authorship in the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate (Andrew Galloway, Cornell University), William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (Rory Loughnane, University of Kent), John Taylor, "the Water Poet" (Edel Semple, University College Cork), Samuel Richardson (Natasha Simonova, University of Oxford), Herman Melville (and his reluctant scrivener ‘Bartleby’) (William E. Engel, Sewanee, The University of the South), James Joyce (Brad Tuggle, University of Alabama), and Grant Morrison (Darragh Greene, University College Dublin).
Handbook of the American Short Story
Author: Erik RedlingPublisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110585324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512
Book Description
The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.
Journals
Author: Herman MelvillePublisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810108233
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 700
Book Description
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces. The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
Modernizing Solitude
Author: Yoshiaki FuruiPublisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
An innovative and timely examination of the concept of solitude in nineteenth-century American literature During the nineteenth century, the United States saw radical developments in media and communication that reshaped concepts of spatiality and temporality. As the telegraph, the postal system, and public transportation became commonplace, the country achieved a level of connectedness that was never possible before. At this level, physical isolation no longer equaled psychological separation from the exterior world, and as communication networks proliferated, being disconnected took on negative cultural connotations. Though solitude, and the lack thereof, is a pressing concern in today’s culture of omnipresent digital connectivity, Yoshiaki Furui shows that solitude has been a significant preoccupation since the nineteenth century. The obsession over solitude is evidenced by many writers of the period, with consequences for many basic notions of creativity, art, and personal and spiritual fulfillment. In Modernizing Solitude: The Networked Individual in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Furui examines, among other works, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters, and telegraphic literature in the 1870s to identify the virtues and values these writers bestowed upon solitude in a time and place where it was being consistently threatened or devalued. Although each writer has a unique way of addressing the theme, they all aim to reclaim solitude as a positive, productive state of being that is essential to the writing process and personal identity. Employing a cross-disciplinary approach to understand modern solitude and the resulting literature, Furui seeks to historicize solitude by anchoring literary works in this revolutionary yet interim period of American communication history, while also applying theoretical insights into the literary analysis.
Grief Taboo in American Literature
Author: Pamela A. BokerPublisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814713149
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
"A compelling, massively researched psychoanalytic study of the inability to mourn in Melville, Twain and Hemingway, and its roots in maternal loss".--Ann Douglas, author of TERRIBLE HONESTY: MONGREL MANHATTAN IN THE 1920S. "This insightful text is recommended for all students of American culture and literature".--CHOICE.