Moby-Dick Illustrated by Gilbert Wilson: A Celebration of Melville’s 200th Birthday by Herman Melville, and: Unfinished and Unbroken: The Life of Artist Gilbert Wilson by Edward K. Spann

Leviathan ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
Robert K. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick

The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-376
Author(s):  
Justine Tally
Keyword(s):  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Nag Hammadi ◽  
The Us ◽  
The University ◽  
The Rose

Abstract Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose.

Lounging on the Sofa with Leigh Hunt: A New Source for the Notes in Melville's Shakespeare Volume

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-115
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sanborn
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Implied Reader ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Periodical Essay

Abstract The argument of this essay is that several of the notes that Herman Melville wrote in the back leaves of one of his Shakespeare volumes——notes that have been an object of interest and speculation ever since their discovery in the 1930s——were responses to essays written by Leigh Hunt and collected in a volume called The Indicator. In all likelihood, Melville read these essays——along with a Quarterly Review essay by Francis Palgrave, which has previously been shown to be the source of other notes in the back of the Shakespeare volume——on the sofa of his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, shortly before or after the birth of his son Malcolm in February 1849. The discovery of the new source is important both as an aid in identifying when and where Melville took all of these notes and as an indication of how carefully Melville studied the British periodical essay before beginning Moby-Dick (1851). In the essays of writers like Hunt, he encountered a form that seemed as though it could stretch to accommodate his literary and philosophical ambitions without sacrificing the companionship of the implied reader. For at least two years, Melville would believe enough in the possibilities of that form to compose his miraculously sociable expressions of unresolvable hope and rage, to give voice to the seemingly ““wicked,”” and yet to feel, as he told Nathaniel Hawthorne, ““spotless as the lamb.””

scholarly journals In the center of a circle: poetics of space in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and H. Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick, or The Whale”

Litera ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Anna Viktorovna Dulina
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Divine Comedy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Distinct Features ◽  
The Impact

This article is dedicated to the analysis of peculiarities of space arrangement in the “Divine Comedy” by Alighieri and the novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale” by Herman Melville. On the examples of structural mythologemes “journey inside yourself” and “path towards the center of a circle”, present in both works, the author notes the impact of Dante upon Melville and determines the differences in their poetics of space. Structural, semantic and comparative-historical analysis of the texts in question allows speaking of the transformation of symbolism of the images of circle and its center, circular, vertical and horizontal movement, as well as reconsideration of meaning of the category of chaos and order, opposition “internal-external” from Dante’s works to worldview of the authors of the era of Romanticism. The novelty of this work consists in simultaneous analysis of the impact of Dante’s poetry upon Melville and comparison of peculiarities of the poetics of space of both authors for determining fundamental changes in representations of the structure of world space and space of the inner world of a person. In artistic realm of H. Melville, symbolic point of the center of a circle – “center of the world” –is no longer static, it becomes unreliable, depicting heads of madman characters and the images of the objects, which semantics does not resemble the concept of emptiness. The motif of the loss of structuredness along with the motif of mutual reciprocity of spatial dimensions and characteristics distinguish Melville’s poetics of space, delineated in the dialogue with distinct features of space arrangement in Dante’s works.

scholarly journals Following the Balibo massacre’s whale

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-213
Author(s):  
Marcus O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
East Timor ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Michelangelo Antonioni

Early on in Tony Maniaty’s Shooting Balibo we come across Herman Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and John Dos Passos. We quickly get the message that this is as much a journey of the imagination as it is a travelogue, memoir or investigation. Maniaty tells us that when he went to East Timor as an ABC reporter in 1975, just before the ill-fated journalists, his travel reading was Melville’s Moby Dick. Here we get a sense of the young journalist’s ambition, his questing commitment to follow the story, just as Ahab follows his whale.

scholarly journals DA ORDEM MÍTICA AO “CAOS ENFEITIÇADO”: O HOMEM E O MUNDO NA ODISSÉIA DE HOMERO E EM MOBY DICK, DE HERMAN MELVILLE

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (17) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Ravel Paz
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick

O trabalho propõe uma aproximação entre a Odisséia e Moby Dick, sublinhando os traços épicos e míticos do romance de Melville em sua dialética com as contradições e o desencantamento de seu tempo. Palavras-chave: Romance e epopéia; Mito e realidade; Desencantamento do mundo.

herman melville in search of the self: Moby dick

1976 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kirsch
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moby Dick

Textual Indigence in the Archive

2021 ◽  
pp. 47-72
Author(s):  
Jed Rasula
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Thomas Pynchon ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Computational Search ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cross

Beginning with a profile of encyclopedic aspirations in Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld, this chapter extends the analysis through Moby-Dick by Herman Melville and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. These are among numerous instances of cultural and intellectual audacity characterized as the encyclopedic novel after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The analysis expands by recounting the history of the encyclopedia as a form emerging from the earlier genre of the anatomy. This legacy, pioneering the cross-referencing system familiar from reference works in general, is now thoroughly integrated into our computational search engines. The novels characterized as encyclopedic, however, turn out to resist the sense of instantaneity and rapidity evident in digital platforms, going so far as to find value in indigence, revealed as the art of non-compliance with compulsory forms of “progress.”

Herman Melville and “Billy Budd”

Tempo ◽  
1951 ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
Ronald Mason
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
The Public ◽  
Billy Budd ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Adventure Stories

Melville's Billy Budd is the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual agony, and it is impossible to value this curious allegory at its true worth without studying it carefully in the light of its author's private despairs. It may be that the publicity that Britten's opera is sure to attract will focus the reluctant interest of the public at last upon a writer who for nearly a century (though he has been only sixty years dead) has been the dimmest of shadows for all but the occasional addict. In England his name is still the barest rumour. Moby Dick has had its boosts, Typee the popular reprintings owed to an entertaining travelogue; yet none of these temporary quirks of fortune has aroused more than the most cursory interest in the mind that created them. Projected into posterity as a crude adventurer who had lived among cannibals and hunted whales before turning these experiences into pleasurable adventure-stories, the richest and profoundest imagination in American literature still remains virtually unrecognised over half the English-speaking world. America is beginning to acknowledge him at last; but in this country indifference is still his lot. Some of his works, I am glad to say, are being reprinted and enjoyed again; but until he is accepted and appreciated as a coherent whole, the understanding given to isolated parts of his work will be at best partial and inadequate.

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