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"Moby Dick (Melville, Herman)"
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Was Moby Dick real?
The tale of the giant white whale immortalized in Herman Melville's classic 1851 novel was inspired by horrifying real events: the shipwreck of a whaling boat and the desperate efforts of its twenty-man crew to survive. With accessible text and vivid full-color imagery, this engrossing volume investigates both the legend and the true story behind Moby Dick. Entertaining fast facts and insightful sidebars will keep elementary-level readers engaged throughout. A Further Reading list with books and websites encourages further exploration.
BOOK
Melville’s Bibles
Many writers in antebellum America sought to reinvent the Bible, but no one, Ilana Pardes argues, was as insistent as Melville on redefining biblical exegesis while doing so. InMoby-Dickhe not only ventured to fashion a grand new inverted Bible in which biblical rebels and outcasts assume center stage, but also aspired to comment on every imaginable mode of biblical interpretation, calling for a radical reconsideration of the politics of biblical reception. InMelville's Bibles,Pardes traces Melville's response to a whole array of nineteenth-century exegetical writings-literary scriptures, biblical scholarship, Holy Land travel narratives, political sermons, and women's bibles. She shows how Melville raised with unparalleled verve the question of what counts as Bible and what counts as interpretation.
eBook
A Psychoanalytical Study of the Gothic Marine Locales in Herman Melville's Moby Dick
This research uncovers the Gothic elements interwoven with the Sublime in the maritime context of Herman Melville's \"Moby Dick\". Using Freud's psychoanalytical frameworks, the study examines the novel's sublime aspects and the psychological depths they signify. It draws on Lacan's and Burke's theories on the conscious and unconscious mind and the contrast between the beautiful and the sublime. These elements suggest deeper insights into Melville's psyche, with characters like Ishmael reflecting his narrative. The conclusion posits \"Moby Dick\" as an intricate interlacing of Gothic and sea-faring motifs that penetrate the human psyche, set against the ocean's expanse. The narrative aboard the Pequod encapsulates the collective human psyche, presenting a tableau of collective yearnings, fears, and fixations. The enigmatic Moby Dick stands as a symbol of nature's grandeur and humanity's relentless pursuit of the unfathomable, with otherworldly occurrences enhancing the story's spectral quality. The story's heart lies in the psychological journey, mainly through Ahab's quixotic quest for the whale, a metaphor for the human penchant for chasing the unreachable. The narrative is laden with symbolism, with the whale as the centerpiece of nature's wonder and the human quest for meaning. The plot navigates through moral ambiguities and deceit, providing depth to its characters. Themes of isolation and desolation are woven into the dangerous yet mesmerizing whaling backdrop, rendering a narrative rich in complexity and allure.
Journal Article
Blurred Line between Good and Evil in Moby-Dick and Post-WWII Cinema: How John Huston Read Melville for his Movie Adaptation
John Huston found ambiguity between good and evil in Melville’s Moby-Dick, which he represented in his 1956 movie adaptation. Hans Robert Jauss’ reception theory complements this analysis of both works through the reactions of their audiences. Moby-Dick is analyzed together with its adaptation, considering the work as a fluid text, to offer a deeper perspective on its ambiguity between good and evil. While the novel responds to Transcendentalism’s enthusiastic view of nature and its search for essential truths, Huston’s adaptation reflects how post-WWII cinema was influenced by the conflict and the consequent difficulties in separating good and evil in humans, who were seen as capable of both sublime noble acts and devastating evil.
Journal Article
Inscrutable Malice
In Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville's abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville's creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work.
Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil, as dramatized in the book of Job; and the discourse of the Christian end-times involving the final destruction of evil, as found in the apocalyptic books and eschatological passages of the Old and New Testaments.
With his detailed reading of Moby-Dick in relation to its most important source text, Cook greatly expands the reader's understanding of the moral, religious, and mythical dimensions of the novel. Both accessible and erudite, Inscrutable Malice will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Melville's classic whaling narrative.
eBook
A Biblical Archetypal Study on Moby Dick
Moby Dick, one of Herman Melville’s masterpieces, has received tremendous concern for its profound and multiple symbolic and metaphoric meanings. And the pervasive biblical terms and allusions deserve particular attention. This paper, based on Frye's archetypal theory, studies Moby Dick from the perspective of biblical archetypal criticism. The association between the characters and their biblical archetypes helps to reproduce the ancient matrix of The Bible, such as the crime of human beings, themes of sin, the fall, and redemption. The exploration of the biblical archetypal theme in Moby Dick provides us a new perspective to understand the profound significance of the novel. Melville reveals the opposition between good and evil in human beings and shows his contradictory religious outlook as well as his spiritual reflections of his time.
Journal Article
Transcendentalism in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalist beliefs had dominated American literature in the Romantic period. It has remained an appealing interest in exploring whether Herman Melville had been influenced by Transcendentalism and in what ways it is embodied in his work. Therefore, this study carries out a detailed analysis of Melville's Transcendentalist tendency in his masterpiece of Moby-Dick. It is found that the characterization of Ahab as a Transcendentalist hero and Ishmael as an Emersonian Individualist are two cases in the point. Furthermore, it also reveals the embodiment of Oversoul in the narration. Altogether, they testify the sign of Transcendental influence over Melville in this novel.
Journal Article
African culture and Melville's art : the creative process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick
Here is that rare work that in research and interpretation is original almost from beginning to end. For the first time we discover that slave music and dance are used by Melville in Moby-Dick in the creation of some of his most tragic and avant-garde art. Just as previously unknown African practices, found in travel accounts, reveal a powerful symbolic link between Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick, Frederick Douglass's formulation of joy-sorrow in slave life and music leads to the discovery of a blues aesthetic in Moby-Dick that is full of implications for American culture and the craft of writing. In the future, neither Benito Cereno nor Moby-Dick, should be read as before, for important passages in each spring from Melville's magnificent treatment of a source common to each. In still more ways, Melville in this volume in not the Melville we have known. Especially in Benito Cereno, the creation of principal characters, symbols, and scenes is drawn from sources hidden in obscurity for roughly a century and a half. Though African influences predominate, Latin American, European, and North American influences are also woven masterfully into the design of the novella. As emphases among them shift back and forth, Melville's art, stunning in its range and subtlety, shimmers with previously undisclosed brilliance. Targeting how he conceived and executed his art, we find in this volume a degree of heretofore unprobed intertexuality in his own work and reveal the other volumes that informed his creative process.
eBook
Harmony through Conflicts: Herman Melville's Attitudes towards Transcendentalism in Moby-Dick
According to the Transcendentalist beliefs proposed by great American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson in the mid-19th century, this article carries out a detailed analysis of Melville's both Anti-Transcendentalist thoughts and Transcendentalist tendency in the perspectives of Oversoul, Individualism, and Man-and-Nature relationship revealed in Moby-Dick. It also lists the reasons for Melville's complex and sophisticated attitude towards Transcendentalism in the hope of directing the critical attention to this aspect that Moby-Dick is a twisted and ambiguous interpretation of Melville's attitude towards Transcendentalism.
Journal Article
Heggie and Scheer's Moby-Dick
\"Book describes the world premiere of the American opera based on Melville's novel Moby-Dick, with the same name. Wallace describes the creative process of writing the music and libretto, the rehearsals and stage design, and the opening night in Dallas in May 2010.\"--ECIP Data View, Summary.
eBook