Moby Dick (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

Melville, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853260088 ISBN 13: 9781853260087

Verlag: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of "Poetry Review" Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his ‘mighty theme’ – not only the whale but all things sublime – Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

Responsive to the shaping forces of his age as only men of passionate imagination are, even Melville can hardly have been fully aware of how symbolical an American hero he had fashioned in Ahab. --F. O. Matthiessen

Reseña del editor

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of `Poetry Review'. Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that `reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his `mighty theme' - not only the whale but all things sublime - Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1853260088
• ISBN 13: 9781853260087
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 544