Melville remains an enigma, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed in her recent interpretative portrait, and most of his shorter works and poetry have gone unread by all but the most scholarly of readers. Bryant, a Melville expert with a clear and vigorous prose style, offers a fresh view of Melville as a failed commercial author who became a great artist concerned with such mysteries as faith and transcendence, sexuality and man's relationship with nature, and the differences and commonalities of various ethnic and racial groups. Melville was also profoundly involved with language itself, an obsession evident in his painstaking revisions, a sampling of which are presented here to chart the evolution of his work, and his boldly experimental approach to combining prose and poetry. Bryant's well-chosen selections, including letters, never-before-published stories and poems, and sections from the long verse epic
Clarel, based on Melville's travels in the Holy Land, support his assertion that Melville and his grand, complex, and soulful work need to be seen in a new light.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Pressestimmen
“An amazing guided tour of the
real Melville.” —
Robert Sullivan“Bryant shows us the writer who, . . . even when he worked in obscurity and despair, was constantly changing, constantly revising, constantly experimenting, with new and more beautiful forms—a writer who had to keep moving, like a shark.” —
Robert Sullivan, author of
A Whale Hunt and The Meadowlands “No other anthology presents the extraordinary range of Melville’s writing across the second half of the nineteenth century or makes vivid Melville’s restless experiments in prose and poetry . . . the fullest picture of Melville’s achievement available in a single volume.” —
Samuel Otter, professor of English, University of California at Berkeley
“Bryant, a Melville expert with a clear and vigorous prose style, offers a fresh view of Melville. . . . Bryant’s well-chosen selections . . . support his assertion that Melville and his grand, complex, and soulful work need to be seen in a new light.” —
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