The Value of Herman Melville

This book explores the writings of Herman Melville across his career and examines the distinctive qualities of his style.

Geoffrey Sanborn (Author)

9781108471442, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 September 2018

168 pages
22.2 x 14.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.32 kg

'Sanborn's book … is an impassioned, sometimes hilarious work and a deeply pedagogical one. He is modeling for us a way of using Melville, of activating the process of thinking about his generative objects. The value comes, finally, in cultivating further connections for ourselves and also in the readiness for new perceptions when confronted with anything as puzzling or difficult as Melville's own texts.' Elisa Tamarkin, Leviathan

In The Value of Herman Melville, Geoffrey Sanborn presents Melville to us neither as a somber purveyor of dark truths nor as an ironist who has outthought us in advance but as a quasi-maternal provider, a writer who wants more than anything else to supply us with the means of enriching our experiences. In twelve brief chapters, Sanborn examines the distinctive qualities of Melville's style - its dynamism, its improvisatoriness, its intimacy with remembered or imagined events - and shows how those qualities, once they have become a part of our equipment for living, enable us to sink deeper roots into the world. Ranging across his career, but focusing in particular on Moby-Dick, 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', 'Benito Cereno', and Billy Budd, Sanborn shows us a Melville who is animating rather than overawing, who encourages us to bring more of ourselves to the present and to care more about the life that we share with others.

Introduction
1. Living the experience
2. He knew not what it would become
3. Grief's fire
4. Susceptibilities
5. Disportings
6. A new way of being happy
7. The meaning of Moby-Dick
8. As if
9. Camp Melville
10. Courting surprise
11. All things trying
12. The non-communicating central self.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]