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Mardi and a Voyage Thither

Volume Three, Scholarly Edition

Mardi and a Voyage Thither( )
Author: Melville, Herman
Editor: Hayford, Harrison
Tanselle, G. Thomas
Parker, Hershel
Series title:Melville Ser.
ISBN:978-0-8101-0015-2
Publication Date:Jun 1970
Publisher:Northwestern University Press
Book Format:Hardback
List Price:USD $120.00
Book Description:

Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849). Melville wanted to exploit the "rich poetical material" of Polynesia and also to escape feeling "irked, cramped, & fettered" by a narrative of facts. "I began to feel . . . a longing to plume my...
More Description

Book Details
Pages:726
Detailed Subjects: Fiction / Literary
Fiction / Visionary & Metaphysical
Physical Dimensions (W X L X H):6.25 x 9.25 x 2.3 Inches
Book Weight:3.256 Pounds
Author Biography
Melville, Herman. (Author)
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction.

Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged.

By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives,



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