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Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by Herman Melville, first published in 1851. It is considered to be one of the Great American Novels.

Moby-Dick has been classified as American Romanticism. It was first published by Richard Bentley in London on October 18, 1851, in an expurgated three-volume edition titled The Whale, and weeks later as a single volume, by New York City publisher Harper and Brothers as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale on November 14, 1851. The book initially received mixed reviews, but is now considered part of the Western canon, and at the center of the canon of American novels.

Background
Moby-Dick was published in 1851 during what has been called the American Renaissance, which saw the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as well as Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), and the first edition of Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855).

There are scholarly theories that purport a literary legend of two Moby-Dick tales, one being inspired by Melville's literary friendship with and respect for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850. He became friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Melville beginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, and his unsigned review of the collection, titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", was printed in the The Literary World on August 17 and 24. Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black"., and dedicated Moby-Dick to him: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."

Melville's expectations
In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne written within days of Moby-Dick's American publication, Melville made a number of revealing comments:

... for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is Jove appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of his great allegory—the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity.

A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your understanding the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable sociabilities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling—no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book—and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul.

Contemporary
Melville was regarded as a very successful author after the acclaim received by his popular earlier works of Typee and Omoo. He considered Moby-Dick to be his magnum opus, but he was shocked and bewildered at the scathing reviews it received. Instead of bringing him the literary acclaim which he sought, this masterwork started a slide toward literary obscurity in his lifetime. This was partially because the book was first published in England, and the American literary establishment took note of what the English critics said, especially when these critics were attached to the more prestigious journals. Many critics praised it, but others agreed with a critic with the highly regarded London Athenaeum, who described it as: "[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact.... The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English."

One problem was that publisher Peter Bentley botched the English edition. For this reason, many of the critics faulted the book, what little they could grasp of it, on purely formal grounds. The generally bad reviews from across the ocean made American readers skittish about picking up the tome. Still, a handful of American critics saw much more in it than most of their U.S. and English colleagues. Hawthorne said of the book: "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones."

Underground
Within a year after Melville's death, Moby-Dick, along with Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, was reprinted by Harper & Brothers, giving it a chance to be rediscovered. However, only New York's literary underground seemed to take much interest, just enough to keep Melville's name circulating for the next 25 years in the capital of American publishing. During this time, a few critics were willing to devote time, space, and a modicum of praise to Melville and his works, or at least those that could still be fairly easily obtained or remembered. Other works, especially the poetry, went largely forgotten.

Then came World War I and its consequences, particularly the shaking or destruction of faith in so many aspects of Western civilization, all of which caused people concerned with culture and its potential redemptive value to experiment with new aesthetic techniques. The stage was set for Melville's legacy to find its place.

The Melville Revival
With the burgeoning of Modernist aesthetics (see Modernism and American modernism) and the war that tore everything apart still so fresh in memory, Moby-Dick began to seem increasingly relevant.

In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about Melville's value.

In the 1920s, British literary critics began to take notice. In his idiosyncratic but landmark Studies in Classic American Literature, novelist, poet, and short story writer D. H. Lawrence directed Americans' attention to the great originality and value of many American authors, among them Melville. Perhaps most surprising is that Lawrence saw Moby-Dick as a work of the first order despite his using the original English edition.

In his 1921 study, The American Novel, Carl Van Doren returned to Melville with much more depth. He called Moby-Dick a pinnacle of American Romanticism.

Post-revival
The next great wave of Moby-Dick appraisal came with the publication of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Published in 1941, the book proposed that Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville were the most prominent figures of a flowering of conflicted (and mostly pre-Civil War) literature important for its promulgation of democracy and the exploration of its possibilities, successes, and failures.

Adaptations
The novel has been adapted a number of times in various media including the stage, radio, TV, comics and graphic novels and movies. The most famous of these was the John Huston film of 1956 produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury. These plays have varied from a the stage version called Moby Dick! The Musical to a 2010 film adaptation of the same name.

Editions

 * Melville, H. The Whale. London: Richard Bentley, 1851 3 vols. (viii, 312; iv, 303; iv, 328 pp.) Published October 18, 1851.
 * Melville, H., Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851. xxiii, 635 pages. Published probably on November 14, 1851.
 * Melville, H., Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1930. In three large volumes, encased in a metal slipcase and distinguished by the original, now iconographic woodblock print illustrations of Rockwell Kent. (read about and view them here.)
 * Melville, H., Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale. Garden City, New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1949. 416 pages. Illustrated by Anton Otto Fischer.
 * Melville, H. Moby-Dick, or The Whale. Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville 6. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern U. Press, 1988. A critical text with appendices on the history and reception of the book. The text is in the public domain.
 * Melville, H. Moby-Dick, or The Whale Arion Press, San Francisco, 1979, illustrated with 100 wood engravings by Barry Moser. Edition of 265, of which 250 were for sale. One of the most noted fine book editions of 20th century America, recognized by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most beautiful books of the century.
 * Melville, H., Moby Dick; or The Whale. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1981. A reduced version of the Arion Press Edition with 100 illustrations by Barry Moser.
 * Melville, H., Moby-Dick or The Whale., 2000, The Modern Library, New York, paper back, introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, with hundreds of illustrations by Rockwell Kent.
 * Melville, H., Moby-Dick The Folio Society 2009. A Limited Edition with 281 illustrations by Rockwell Kent.
 * Melville, H., "Moby Dick", 2011, Harper Perennial Classics,

Critical editions

 * Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Editions), Edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: W.W. Norton, 2nd ed. 2002. ISBN 978-0-393-97283-2.
 * Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition, Edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer. New York: Longman, 2007 and 2009. ISBN 978-0-321-22800-0.

Audio texts

 * Moby Dick Big Read at http://www.mobydickbigread.com
 * Lit to Go at http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick
 * Librivox at http://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/

Motion picture adaptations

 * (1926)—starring John Barrymore
 * (1930)—starring John Barrymore
 * (1956)—starring Gregory Peck
 * (1978)—starring Jack Aranson
 * (1998)—starring Patrick Stewart
 * (2010)—starring Barry Bostwick
 * (2011)—starring William Hurt

Documentaries

 * "Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World", PBS, American Experience, 2010. Cf. section on Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick.

Commentary and criticism

 * "Did Melville Borrow the Idea for 'Moby Dick'?", Weekend Edition, NPR. A radio discussion with literary historian Paul Collins.
 * Moby Dick - General Concordances

Maps

 * Moby-Dick Map

 Category:1851 novels Category:19th-century American novels Category:Allegory Category:American novels adapted into films Category:Books adapted into films Category:Nantucket, Massachusetts Category:Maritime folklore Category:Novels by Herman Melville Category:Harper & Brothers books Category:Nautical fiction