Moby-Dick: The Norton Library: 0 - Softcover

Melville, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393870790 ISBN 13: 9780393870794

Publisher: WW Norton & Co, 2023

Synopsis

Part of the Norton Library Series

The Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick features the text of the first U.S. edition. An introduction by Jeffrey Insko celebrates the novel as a love letter to language and explores the landscape of allegorical interpretations—from the impending doom of environmental crises to the shifting of sociocultural and intellectual sensibilities—that make the novel as timely today as it was in 1851.

About the Editor: Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (2018).

About this title

About the Authors

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, the third child of Maria and Allan Gansevoort Melvill. (The final e was added to the family name later.) His father’s financial difficulties and his early death while Melville was still a youth disrupted his formal education. Instead, Melville tried his hand at a variety of occupations before joining the crew of a merchant ship bound for England in 1839. Two years later he sailed to the South Seas aboard the whaler Acushnet. His early fiction, like the novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), drew upon and often embellished his exotic maritime adventures, earning him both popular and critical acclaim. But by the time he published Moby-Dick in 1851, his writing career was in decline, as both sales and praise of his works dwindled. Although he would subsequently publish two more novels and a number of short stories―including the masterpieces “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”―Melville spent the last three decades of his life primarily writing poetry. Largely forgotten at the time of his death on April 19, 1891, Melville, along with his unfinished novella Billy Budd, was rediscovered and his reputation revived in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (2018). He lives in Michigan with his wife Katy and dog Murphy.

Edition details

• Publisher: WW Norton & Co
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393870790
• ISBN 13: 9780393870794
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 704
• Editor: Insko Jeffrey