Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory

Moby-Dick and Melville’s Anti-Slavery Allegory PDF

Author: Brian R. Pellar

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-06-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 3319522671

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This book unfurls and examines the anti-slavery allegory at the subtextual core of Herman Melville’s famed novel, Moby-Dick. Brian Pellar points to symbols and allusions in the novel such as the albinism of the famed whale, the “Ship of State” motif, Calhoun’s “cords,” the equator, Jonah, Narcissus, St. Paul, and Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan. The work contextualizes these devices within a historical discussion of the Compromise of 1850 and subsequently strengthened Fugitive Slave Laws. Drawing on a rich variety of sources such as unpublished papers, letters, reviews, and family memorabilia, the chapters discuss the significance of these laws within Melville’s own life. After clarifying the hidden allegory interconnecting black slaves and black whales, this book carefully sheds the layers of a hidden meaning that will be too convincing to ignore for future readings: Moby-Dick is ultimately a novel that is intimately connected with questions of race, slavery, and the state.

Chasing the White Whale

Chasing the White Whale PDF

Author: Jessica Slone

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 9781124677699

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The work of Herman Melville has been explored by hundreds of scholars in the hopes of supporting a variety of claims. Until recent decades, the concept of slavery was applied only to works such as Benito Cereno and White-Jacket . However, in the midst of these studies sits Melville's largest accomplishment: Moby-Dick . Although that novel has been studied in depth by many, few have recognized the intricately constructed, carefully disguised slavery metaphor it conceals. This study offers a deeper understanding of Moby-Dick by relating its text to Herman Melville's unique position in relation to the nation's anti-slavery controversy, culminating in a discussion of the "fast-fish, loose-fish" concept, its importance to the whaling community, as well as its connection to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Combining these ideas, this project highlights not only the strength of Melville's anti-slavery feeling, but his innate ability to both craft and protect his message.

Moby Dick

Moby Dick PDF

Author: Herman Melville

Publisher: anboco

Published: 2016-05-04

Total Pages: 757

ISBN-13: 3736403046

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Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by Herman Melville considered an outstanding work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Ishmael narrates the monomaniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the twentieth century. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world", and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". "Call me Ishmael" is one of world literature's most famous opening sentences.

Why Read Moby-Dick?

Why Read Moby-Dick? PDF

Author: Nathaniel Philbrick

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2013-09-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0143123971

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A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review

Melville and the Idea of Blackness

Melville and the Idea of Blackness PDF

Author: Christopher Freeburg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1139536729

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By examining the unique problems that 'blackness' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Encantadas', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville's critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, Freeburg asserts that blackness functions as the site where Melville correlates the sociopolitical challenges of transatlantic slavery and US colonial expansion with philosophical concerns about mastery. By focusing on Melville's iconic interracial encounters, Freeburg reveals the important role blackness plays in Melville's portrayal of characters' arduous attempts to seize their own destiny, amass scientific knowledge and perfect themselves. A valuable resource for scholars and graduate students in American literature, this text will also appeal to those working in American, African American and postcolonial studies.

Melville's Mirrors

Melville's Mirrors PDF

Author: Brian Yothers

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1640140530

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An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War PDF

Author: Herman Melville

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 1866

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is the first book of poetry published by American author Herman Melville. The volume is dedicated "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Country" and its 72 poems deal with the battles and personalities of the American Civil War and their aftermath. Critics at the time were at best respectful and often sharply critical of Melville's unorthodox style. The book had sold only 486 copies by 1868 and recovered barely half of its publications costs.[1] Not until the latter half of the twentieth century did Battle-Pieces become regarded as one of the most important group of poems on the American Civil War.

"Pretends to be Free"

Author: Graham Russell Hodges

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9780815315315

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First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Empire of Necessity

The Empire of Necessity PDF

Author: Greg Grandin

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1429943173

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From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

A New Companion to Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville PDF

Author: Wyn Kelley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2022-08-29

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 1119668506

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Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hem­ispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.