Exiled Royalties

Melville and the Life We Imagine

Robert Milder (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

312 Seiten

2009
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-533910-9 (ISBN)

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Exiled Royalties is a literary-biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. The ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life,'" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. The title essay takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab," Melville's mythic projection of his own feelings of emotional and ontological disinheritance. How to live nobly in spiritual exile-to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God-was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. Exiled Royalties explores the ways in which Melville satisfied this impulse throughout his forty-five year career, how it shaped the matter and manner of his work, and how his writing, in turn, reflexively bore upon his private life and upon the life of the nation.

Robert Milder is Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis.

1. Melville and Polynesia ; 2. The Broken Circle: Melville and (Post )Romanticism ; 3. The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (1): Melville's Metaphysics of Democracy: "Hawthorne and His Mosses" ; 4. The Theory and Practice of Democratic Tragedy (2): Ishmael's Grand Erections _ ; 5. Exiled Royalties _ ; 6. "The Ugly Socrates": Melville, Hawthorne, and the Varieties of Homoerotic Experience _ ; 7. An Arch Between Two Lives: Melville and the Mediterranean, 1856-1857 ; 8. Uncivil Wars _ ; 9. Unworldly Yearners: Agnostic Spirituality in Clarel ; 10. Aims for Oblivion

Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	440 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-19-533910-X / 019533910X
ISBN-13	978-0-19-533910-9 / 9780195339109
Zustand	Neuware