New Essays Billy Budd

This page intentionally left blank NEW ESSAYS ON BILLY BUDD The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to great works of American literature. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the work’s composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specifically commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretative methods and prominent contemporary ideas on the text. There are also helpful guides to further reading. Specifically designed for undergraduates, the series will be a powerful resource for anyone engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels and other important texts. Billy Budd is Herman Melville ’s most read work after MobyDick, and it is regularly taught in literature courses of all kinds. Melville wrote the novella during the five years before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1924. The essays collected here investigate Billy Budd in the context of nineteenth-century political and social dynamics and the literary response they provoked, as well as the relevance of mythology and the histories of the classical world and Judaeo-Christian civilization to Melville ’s book. Also examined are Melville ’s later writing, including the late poetry; the text’s development; and its ambiguities. The collection will prove an invaluable resource for students of this major American writer. Donald Yannella, a noted scholar of American Romanticism, is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson and co-author of Herman Melville’s Malcolm Letter, among other books; he edited Extracts, the Melville Society quarterly, for fifteen years. * The American Novel * general editor Emory Elliott University of California, Riverside Other works in the series: The Scarlet Letter The Great Gatsby Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Moby-Dick Uncle Tom’s Cabin The Last of the Mohicans The Red Badge of Courage The Sun Also Rises A Farewell to Arms The American The Portrait of a Lady Light in August The Awakening Invisible Man Native Son Their Eyes Were Watching God The Grapes of Wrath Winesburg, Ohio Sister Carrie The Rise of Silas Lapham The Catcher in the Rye White Noise The Crying of Lot 49 Walden Poe’s Major Tales Rabbit, Run Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw Hawthorne’s Major Tales The Sound and the Fury The Country of the Pointed Firs Song of Solomon Wise Blood Go Tell It on the Mountain The Education of Henry Adams Go Down, Moses Call It Sleep NEW ESSAYS ON BILLY BUDD edited by DONALD YANNELLA           The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-03735-X eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-41778-3 hardback ISBN 0-521-42829-7 paperback To the new innocents, our grandchildren, Julia, Kate, Peter, Elizabeth, Margaret, Lena, Helen, et al. fut. Contents Series Edi