Exiled royalties
Subtitle: Melville and the life we imagine
By: Robert Milder.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9780195142327
Subjects: Melville, Herman, -- 1819-1891; Melville, Herman, -- 1819-1891 -- Political and social views; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Democracy in literature
Genres: Biography.
Description: "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. Conceived separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, 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."--BOOK JACKET
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-284) and index.
Table of contents: title: Anticipating freedom : Melville and Polynesia; title: The broken circle : Melville and (post-)romanticism; title: The theory and practice of democratic tragedy (1) : Melville's metaphysics of democracy: "Hawthorne and his mosses"; title: The theory and practice of democratic tragedy (2) : Ishmael's grand erections; title: Exiled royalties; title: "The ugly Socrates" : Melville, Hawthorne, and the varieties of Homoerotic experience; title: An arch between two lives : Melville and the Mediterranean, 1856-1857; title: Uncivil wars; title: Unworldly yearners : agnostic spirituality in Clarel; title: Alms for oblivion.