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5.0étoiles sur 5
best one-volume melville?, Déc 22 2001
After a lot of browsing among different editions of Melville's works, I chose this one because it was attractive and cheap and contained all of his acknowledged masterpieces. Getting "Moby-Dick," "Billy Budd," and his greatest short stories and poems in one well-made volume, for ($$$) bucks, is indeed a pretty good deal. I wish Library of America would start commissioning some scholarly introductions for their books, though. Their volumes seem to be geared towards intelligent people who are not necessarily experts in a particular field, and it would be useful to provide an introduction that places the works in context and gives a brief idea of the latest scholarship. There is a "Note on the Texts" here, which is really of interest only to specialists, and a chronology of Melville's life, and some rather random and cursory endnotes: there are only a few pages' worth for "Moby-Dick," for example, which could be annotated much more extensively (and I'm sure it has been). It's unclear why the editors choose to explain some of Melville's allusions but not others. So if you're looking for a well-annotated "Moby-Dick," look elsewhere. As for the works themselves, there's little I could say about them that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Every one of Melville's lines crackle with dark intensity; his writing is relentless, wild, eccentric, sometimes out of control, but even then it's a pleasure to follow him on his fiery way. His is a kind of uniquely American tragic sense, the dark flip side of Emerson and Whitman's democratic individualism. Ahab, and Bartleby, are supreme individualists, but their uncompromised visions lead to doom rather than liberation.
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