Herman Melville's Malcolm Letter

Man's Final Love

Inbunden, Engelska, 1993

919 kr

Tillfälligt slut

This previously unpublished letter, one of 36 to be retrieved since the publication of The Letters of Herman Melville (1960), has earned a place in the New York Public Library's Gansevoort-Lansing Collection. The Malcolm Letter was written by Melville in 1849, on the birth of his son. In a bit of dramatic irony, Melville reflects on the responsibility looming ahead of him as the reader notes the tragedy that Melville cannot possibly foresee- his son Malcolm's suicide eighteen years later. Cohen and Yannella's careful study relives for the reader this and other events which shaped the clannish Melville family history and how the author's struggle with these pressures is manifested in his writing.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum1993-01-01
Mått159 x 235 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor258
FörlagFordham University Press
ISBN9780823211845

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur

The center of this book is a relatively slight, approximately 500-word, jocular letter Herman Melville wrote to his brother Allan on February 20th, 1849, just after the birth of the novelist's oldest child, Malcolm, who is the subject of the letter, one that is not included in the collected edition (Yale, 1960). Cohen and Yannella use this letter as the occasion for a thorough exploration of Melville-Shaw-Gansevoort family relationships. It is their thesis that the emphasis on authoritarian, Calvinistic parenthood and careful cherishing and preservation of family position and reputation, by example and precept, play an important role in shaping Melville's attitudes in his life and writing, and perhaps, contribute to the poignant suicide of the "prodigy" Malcolm at age 18. Whatever this rather ungainly book, with its 17 separately annotated appendixes, adds to our knowledge of Melville biography, it has also, in its numerous pictures, quotations, and descriptions of interpersonal relationships, its own rewards for the significant interpretation of family life in 19th-century America. (—Choice)