In this book, the author sets out to dispel the idea that Melville was an author of raw genius who knew, or cared little, about the art of the novel. Rather, he shows how Melville not only knew about the novelist's craft, but also appropriated and transformed a series of distinct genres.

The Weaver God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel

Introduction 1. The Tambourine in Glory 2. Benito Cereno and Moby Dick 3. The Hatchet-Polishers, Benito Cereno, and Amasa Delano 4. Cheer and Gloom: Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville on Slave Music and Dance Appendix: Chapter XVI from Captain Amasa Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels

/pdf/excerpt-from-african-culture-and-melville-s-art-the-creative-1kfxjguzai.pdf

Excerpt from African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick

Many of my American colleagues are feeling the damp, drizzly November in the soul as that month, and all its anti-promise, looms ahead. Mine came a little early. I was nearing the end of an eleven-...

Political tourism in a problem country: teaching Moby Dick in Cyprus

It remains one of the great ironies of American literary history that Melville's Moby-Dick struggled so long for critical and popular recognition. It is a peculiar text (but, then, so are Hawthorne's novels), a romance of the whale fishery that involves such explorations of language itself, of words, metaphor, symbol, allegory and the processes (and significance) of narrative construction. This article analyses its 'peculiarities' as fundamental indicators of Melville's 'playful art' to argue the usefulness of a concept of 'play' to its appreciation. That Moby-Dick is allusive and multi-layered is well known. But for what apparent purpose and to what effect? Here, a claim is made that Melville simultaneously constructs and deconstructs meaning by demonstrating that things ('in complex subjects') never come simply or singly. The later Barthes and Derrida become part of this ship's crew and Moby-Dick is a postmodernist novel avant la lettre.

Playful learning : Melville's artful art in Moby-Dick

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