Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 230 pages
- Published by: University Of Chicago Press September 1, 2001
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0226321320
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226321325
-
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
- Weighs: 6.4 ounces
Product Description
Hayford and Sealts's text was the first accurate version of Melville's final novel. Based on a close analysis of the manuscript, thoroughly annotated, and packaged with a history of the text and perspectives for its criticism, this edition will remain the definitive version of a profoundly suggestive story.
"The texts are impeccably accurate. . . . The collection is accompanied by an unobtrusive but expert annotation. . . . Probably Melville's finest short work, the incomplete 'Billy Budd,' [is] a striking reworking of the crucifixion set in the English maritime service of the Revolutionary period."—John Sutherland,
The Los Angeles Times
About The Author
Herman Melville was born in 1819 in
New York City. After his father's death he left school for a series of clerical jobs before going to sea as a young man of nineteen. At twenty-one he shipped aboard the whaler
Acushnet and began a series of adventures in the South Seas that would last for three years and form the basis for his first two novels,
Typee and
Omoo. Although these two novels sold well and gained for Melville a measure of fame, nineteenth-century readers were puzzled by the experiments with form that he began with his third novel,
Mardi, and continued brilliantly in his masterpiece,
Moby-Dick. During his later years spent working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville published only poems, compiled in a collection entitled
Battle-Pieces, and died in 1891 with
Billy Budd, Sailor, now considered a classic, still unpublished.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader ReviewsHerman Melville's novella "Billy Budd" recounts the tragic story of a young man impressed into service aboard the British man-of-war 'Bellipotent' in the late 1790's. Billy is called the 'Handsome Sailor' no less because of his angelic features than for his absolute moral purity and innocence. Initially aboard a merchantman, where he is revered by his fellows and treated accordingly, once aboard a warship, Billy is not greeted by such universal admiration. John Claggart, the master-at-arms, the policeman of the ship, fosters an intense homoerotic hatred of Billy, drawing the young man into the commerce of realistic human interaction. Melville does a fantastic job in so short a work of characterization. From the main characters, Budd, Claggart, and the captain/philosopher Starry Vere, to minor characters of significance like the old Dansker, Melville gives carefully detailed and finely nuanced renderings of the players and their roles and responses to the events of the story. Claggart's conflict with Budd takes on special urgency with the 1790's problem of mutinies aboard British sea-going vessels. Vere and his court must try to distinguish moral responsibility from legal necessity to judge the fatal interactions between Claggart and Budd. Melville is sensitive to late 18th century philosophical currents in regard to both American independence and the French Revolution - Discussions of rights and nature are scattered through the text. Complicating these strains are theological currents of good and evil, innocence and natural depravity. "Billy Budd" is a fine work, and wonderfully complex. This excellent edition, compiled and edited by Hayford and Seals, is the appropriate one for the scholar or the completist. It includes extensive notes and critical interpretations (sadly only through the initial publication of this edition - 1962), photo reprints of Melville's manuscript, and textual commentary. Absolutely worth reading and rereading.
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