Showing results by author "Herman Melville" in All Categories

The action is set within the claustrophobic confines of a British man-of-war ship in the summer of 1797. Here live the crew of the HMS Indomitable, many of them pressed into service against their will.

Billy Budd, however, enjoys naval life. But the evil master-at-arms, Claggart, loathes his fresh-faced innocence and accuses him of mutiny. From this false charge springs a naval tragedy.

On an island off the coast of Chile, Captain Amaso Delano, sailing an American sealer, sees the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship, in obvious distress. Capt. Delano boards the San Dominick, providing needed supplies, and tries to learn from her aloof and disturbed captain, Benito Cereno, the story of how this ship came to be where she is. Dealing with racism, the slave trade, madness, the tension between representation and reality, and featuring at least one unreliable narrator, Melville's novella has both captivated and frustrated critics for decades.View our full collection of podcasts at ...

"The Encantadas" or "Enchanted Isles" is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of ten philosophical "Sketches" on the Encantadas, or Galápagos Islands. It was collected in "The Piazza Tales" in 1856. "The Encantadas" was a success with the critics, but it did not help Melville out of his financial troubles.

L'incredibile avventura del Capitano Ahab e di "Moby Dick", la grande balena bianca, in lingua inglese! Una collana di Classici della letteratura in lingua originale, per giovani desiderosi di imparare una nuova lingua, in forma ridotta per renderli più facili. Pubblicati come audiolibri per permettere di apprendere in modo ancora più semplice la pronuncia delle parole.

Fully restored and remastered, Heritage Media presents the greatest of vintage artists in classic dramas of the early America’s. Here is the legendary Laurence Olivier starring in ‘The Country of the Blind’, adapted from the original tale by H. G. Wells and ‘Bartelby’ adapted by Herman Melville.Theatre Royal is a unique series of classic radio dramas produced in the 1950s by the late Harry Alan Towers.

When Herman Melville finished Moby Dick, he wrote a letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne and said: "I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as the lamb." Unfortunately, very few people actually finish reading this 'wicked' book. One early critic said: "Melville's book can sink a ship with greater force than any whale that I know of." Moby Dick, as originally written, is just plain heavy, difficult to read from cover to cover.

November - the 11th month of the year in the Gregorian calendar, when the land becomes bleaker, harsher but no less beautiful for that. For our poets, including Hood, Arnold, Melville, Alford, and Hardy, there is much to write and comment on.

La lettura di Daniele Fior è un flusso di coscienza dirompente, ironico, intimo e burrascoso; un fiume inafferrabile e inarrestabile, a cui il delicato e matematico pianoforte di Alessandro Scolz fa da contrappunto. Questo romanzo non è un'allegoria (come Melville sottolineava ardentemente), quanto invece lo specchio di quello che riconosciamo come allegoria in esso; Moby Dick è così carico di vita e frutto di una così pregna esperienza reale profonda, che sono la nostra vita e i significati che le attribuiamo a trovare una corrispondenza in esso.

The narrator, an elderly, unnamed Manhattan lawyer, already employs two scriveners to copy legal documents by hand. An increase in business leads him to hire a third: the forlorn-looking Bartleby. At first, Bartleby produces a large volume of high-quality work. But one day, when asked to proofread, Bartleby answers with what soon becomes his perpetual response to every request: "I would prefer not to."

"The Lightning-Rod Man" appeared in 1854, in Putnam's Monthly Magazine no. 20 (August). What grand irregular thunder, thought I, standing on my hearthstone among the Acroceraunian hills, as the scattered bolts boomed overhead and crashed down among the valleys, every bolt followed by zigzag irradiations, and swift slants of sharp rain, which audibly rang, like a charge of spear-points, on my low shingled roof. I suppose, though, that the mountains hereabouts break and churn up the thunder, so that it is far more glorious here than on the plain.

"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by Herman Melville. The story first appeared, anonymously, in Putnam's Magazine in two parts. The first part appeared in November 1853, with the conclusion published in December 1853. It was reprinted in Melville's The Piazza Tales in 1856 with minor textual alterations. The work is said to have been inspired, in part, by Melville's reading of Emerson, and some have pointed to specific parallels to Emerson's essay, "The Transcendentalist."View our full collection of podcasts at our website: https://www.solgoodmedia.com or ...

La lucha de un hombre obstinado contra una ballena Moby Dick es considerado por la critica como una de las novelas mas importantes de la literatura universal ya que aunque aparentemente es la simple historia de un marinero obsesionado por cazar una elusiva ballena, es un inmenso poema lirico que tiene como fondo el ansia de triunfo de todo ser humano.

After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman, Melville published "The Lightning-Rod Man". At the end of this short story, the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. However, that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers are gullible.

"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of ten philosophical "Sketches" on the Encantadas, or Galápagos Islands. It was collected in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Encantadas was a success with the critics, and contained some of Melville's "most memorable prose". An anonymous narrator unites the ten disparate "Sketches", each of which begin with a few lines of poetry, mostly taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Written as an introductory story to The Piazza Tales, the protagonist of The Piazza idealizes a radiant spot on the mountain that he looks upon from his piazza. Traveling to the spot he realizes it is a house, occupied by the unhappy girl Marianna, who longs to see the lucky individual who lives in the white house she looks upon from her window. The narrator realizes he has been the object of a fantasy like his own, and leaves thinking how all idealism is an illusion.

Ahab is the captain of a whaling ship named the Pequod. His great obsession with the giant whale, Moby Dick, makes him embark on a dangerous voyage. Some years before, the captain lost his leg because of the whale and now Ahab’s main desire is to take his revenge on the whale by killing it. He is so obsessed, that Ahab is ready to sacrifice everything he has, including the Pequod and all the members of his crew, and even his own life.

Written in seclusion following the intense negative public reaction to the publication of his novel Pierre, The Piazza Tales is Herman Melville's accessible and entertaining collection of short stories and novellas concerning love, labor, and loss. The collection includes his three most important achievements in the genre of short fiction: the short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the novellas Benito Cereno and The Encantadas.

"Moby-Dick oder Der Wal" (englisch "Moby-Dick or The Whale") ist ein 1851 in London und New York erschienener Roman des amerikanischen Schriftstellers Herman Melville (1819–1891). Das erzählerische Rückgrat des Romans ist die schicksalhafte Fahrt des Walfangschiffes Pequod. Unter dem finsteren Kapitän Ahab kreuzt eine gemischte Mannschaft rauer Walfänger auf ihrem unheimlichen Schiff über die vier Weltmeere. Sie jagen den weißen Wal, den die Seeleute Moby Dick nennen. Moby Dick hat dem Kapitän ein Bein vom Körper gerissen, und nun verfolgt dieser den weißen Wal mit tödlichem Hass.

Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, "Pierre" has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with "The Golden Bowl", "Women in Love", and "Ulysses". None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, The Lightning-Rod Man was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, the Lightning-Rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning-rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult encounter with the Lightning-Rod man in this story about overcoming fear and superstition.