E-Book Overview
<em>"One of the great strengths of this third edition is Hershel Parker's inclusion of commentary onMoby-Dick<em>from its publication in 1851 right into the 21st century to answer whyMoby-Dick<em>--boisterous, beautiful, filled with soaring language, forever questioning, and nearly 200 years old--is more popular than ever."--MARY K. BERCAW EDWARDS,<em>University of Connecticut This Norton Critical Edition includes: • Melville’s classic novel of whaling and revenge, based on Hershel Parker’s revision of the 1967 text edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. • Twenty-six illustrations, including maps, contemporary engravings, and diagrams of whaleboat rigging. • Background and source materials centering on whaling and whalecraft, Melville’s international reception, the inspirations for Moby-Dick, and Melville’s related correspondence. • Forty-four reviews and interpretations of the novel spanning three centuries. • A revised and updated Selected Bibliography.
E-Book Content
The Editor Hershel Parker, H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus, University of Delaware, is author of the two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography and Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. He was one of the original editors of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and is coeditor of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man.
NORTON CRITICAL EDITIONS American realism & Reform ALCOTT, Little Women ALGER, Ragged Dick ANDERSON, Winesburg, Ohio CHESNUTT, The Conjure Stories CHESNUTT, The Marrow of Tradition CHOPIN, The Awakening CRANE, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets CRANE, The Red Badge of Courage DOUGLASS, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass DREISER, S ister Carrie DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk EMERSON, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry FULLER, W oman in the Nineteenth Century HAWTHORNE, The Blithedale Romance HAWTHORNE, The House of the Seven Gables HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings HOWELLS, The Rise of Silas Lapham JACOBS, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl JAMES, The Ambassadors JAMES, The American JAMES, The Portrait of a Lady JAMES, Tales of Henry James JAMES, The Turn of the Screw JAMES, The Wings of the Dove LINCOLN, Lincoln’s Selected Writings MELVILLE, The Confidence-M an MELVILLE, Melville’s Short Novels MELVILLE, Moby-Dick MELVILLE, Pierre MONTGOMERY, Anne of Green Gables MOODIE, Roughing It in the Bush NORRIS, McTeague NORTHUP, Twelve Years a Slave POE, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe RIIS, How the Other Half Lives SINCLAIR, The Jungle STOWE, U ncle Tom’s Cabin THOREAU, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings TWAIN, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn TWAIN, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court TWAIN, Pudd’nhead Wilson and T hose Extraordinary Twins WASHINGTON, Up From Slavery WHARTON, The Age of Innocence WHARTON, Ethan Frome WHARTON, The House of Mirth WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings For a complete list of Norton Critical Editions, visit wwnorton.com /nortoncriticals
A NORTON CR ITICA L EDITION
Herman Melville MOBY-DICK
AN AUTHORITATIVE TEXT CONTEXTS CRITICISM
THIRD EDITION
Edited by HERSHEL PARKER UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, EMERITUS
n W • W • NORTON & COMPANY
•
New York • London
W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the P eople’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By midcentury, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—trade books and college t