Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales by Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales by Herman Melville

`Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.' So wrote Melville of Billy Budd, Sailor, among the greatest of his works and, in its richness and ambiguity, among the most problematic. As the critic E. L. Grant Watson writes, `In this short history of the impressment and hanging of a handsome sailor-boy are to be discovered problems as profound as those which puzzle us in the pages of the Gospels.' Outwardly a compelling narrative of events aboard a British man-of-war during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Billy Budd, Sailor is a nautical recasting of the Fall, a parable of good and evil, a meditation on justice and political governance, and a searching portrait of three extraordinary men. The passion it has aroused in its readers over the years is a measure of how deeply it addresses some of the fundamental questions of experience that every age must reexamine for itself. The selection in this volume represents the best of Melville's shorter fiction, and uses the most authoritative texts. The eight shorter tales included here were composed during Melville's years as a magazine writer in the mid 1850's and establish him, along with Hawthorne and Poe, as the greatest American story writer of his age. Several of the tales - Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Encantadas, The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids - are acknowledged masterpieces of their genres. All show Melville a master of irony, point-of-view, and tone whose fables ripple out in nearly endless circles of meaning. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Robert Milder is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is editor of Critical Essays on Melville's `Billy Budd, Sailor' and the author of Reimagining Thoreau.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199538911
ISBN 10	0199538913
Title	Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales
Author	Herman Melville
Series	Oxford World's Classics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2009-02-26
Number of pages	464
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.