Yannella D. New Essays on Billy Budd

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. — 167 p.The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to great works of American literature. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the work’s composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specifically commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretative methods and prominent contemporary ideas on the text. There are also helpful guides to further reading. Specifically designed for undergraduates, the series will be a powerful resource for anyone engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels and other important texts.
Billy Budd is Herman Melville ’s most read work after Moby-Dick, and it is regularly taught in literature courses of all kinds. Melville wrote the novella during the five years before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1924. The essays collected here investigate Billy Budd in the context of nineteenth-century political and social dynamics and the literary response they provoked, as well as the relevance of mythology and the histories of the classical world and Judaeo-Christian civilization to Melville’s book. Also examined are Melville’s later writing (including the late poetry), the text’s development and its ambiguities. The collection will prove an invaluable resource for students of this major American writer.Donald Yannella, a noted scholar of American Romanticism, is the author of RalphWaldo Emerson and co-author of Herman Melville’s Malcolm Letter, among other books; he edited Extracts, the Melville Society quarterly, for fifteen years.