DAN McCALL
MELVILLE'S SHORT NOVELS - EDITED BY DAN McCALL (NORTON CRITICAL)
Back Cover
This Norton Critical Edition presents three of Melville’s most important short novels—Bartleby, The Scrivener; Benito Cereno; and Billy Budd. The texts are accompanied by ample explanatory annotation…
…an unusually rich “Criticism” section includes twenty-eight wide ranging pieces that often contradict one another and that are sure to promote classroom discussion. Among the contributors are Leo Marx, Elizabeth Hardwick, Frederick Busch, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Robert Lowell, C.L.R. James, Allan Moore Emery, Michael Rogin, Hershel Parker, Ann Douglas, Joyce Sparer Adler, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, and Dan McCall.
Excerpt - Editor's Preface
One’s understanding of Melville’s genius is immensely enriched by considering his sources and what he did with them…
We must be careful, though, not to use any of these as the key to Melville’s imagination but as an example of its deeply obsessive activity. He wrote to his literary friend and adviser Evert Duyckinck, “I love all men who dive!” This most powerful of American minds was swimming through libraries, and he happened to kick up all sorts of things in the sand. They intrigued him; he picked them up and turned them over in his “visible hands,” way down there, deep down with that “whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”