NP: Moby Dick

[Mark Kohut]

If .99c can be spent for a Kindle book, free app for, I recommend the
Norton Critical
edition as the one that could be used if one had no other sources.

Go look at it at Amazon, all kinds of biographical, historical, very
interesting stuff and critical essays
and annotations....

There are lotsa good full books on Moby Dick. Lotsa good essays. One can
find lotsa critical
discussion via Moby Dick and Melville in Google Books, though often not the
whole piece but intros,
summaries, riffs from the books, etc.

In libraries, one can find the works of those who started the rebirth of
Melville in the beginning of the 20th Century.
Matthiessen, Newton Arvin and the Plist-known name, Lewis Mumford.

Herschel Parker has written the major full definitive biography. See what
he mentions anywhere.
I asked him once at a signing if he thought
the stammered uncontrolled punch in Billy Budd COULD HAVE been inspired by
that charge some
have brought against him in recent decades, that he may have hit his wife.
I speculated maybe that once, wildly,
not really angrily a blow at her, but an angry blow that did hit her and he
knew too late he should have been
in control, not so overcome with anger. Artistically rendered into Billy
Budd.

He thought No to that. Because he Is uncertain about the domestic violence
charge.

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 1:51 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Calling you, Ishmailian, but others should chime in.
>
> Looking for recommendations of critical essays/papers on Moby Dick, in
> advance of a reread that, hopefully, will be more informed than the last
> one. I don't have a specific focus in mind - lit crit (not too jargon-y -
> I'm a civilian), psychological, philosophical, character studies, language,
> the theme of work, etc. Basically, anything anyone here has read that they
> found illuminating. The one criterion: must be available on line.
>
> Laura
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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