Call Me Ishmael

One of the most stimulating essays ever written on Moby Dick, and for that matter on any piece of literature, and the forces behind it.--San Francisco Chronicle

First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences--especially Shakespearean ones--on Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the theory of the two Moby-Dicks, Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville's reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: the first book did not contain Ahab, writes Olson, and it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick. If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the theory of the two Moby-Dicks, it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy.

Author: Charles Olson
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 11/28/1997
Pages: 164
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 8.38h x 6.02w x 0.41d
ISBN: 9780801857317

About the Author

Charles Olson (1910-1970), an avant garde poet, literary critic, and literary theorist, is the author of The Maximus Poems, The Distances, The Human Universe and Other Essays, and In Cold Hell, in Thicket.

This title is not returnable