Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings: The Writings of Herman Melville, Volume 13 (Volume 13) - Softcover

Melville, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810111144 ISBN 13: 9780810111141

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The gripping tale of a handsome and charismatic young sailor who runs afoul of his ship’s master-at-arms, is falsely accused of inciting a mutiny, and hung, Billy Budd, Sailor is often treated as a masterpiece, a canonical work. But that assessment is at least partly founded on the assumption that the story was complete and ready for publication when it was left among the manuscripts on Melville’s writing desk when he died in 1891. As Hershel Parker has pointed out, “It is a wonderfully teachable story—as long as it is not taught as a finished, complete, coherent, and totally interpretable work of art.” Furthering Melville’s goal of getting his last literary projects into print, even in their imperfect forms, this last volume in the edition presents the poetry and prose that Melville was unable to finish, his sometimes ineffectual, sometimes heroic purposes betrayed by death.

These unfinished writings include, besides Billy Budd, two projected volumes containing poems and prose pieces, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope; three prose pieces, “Rammon,” “Story of Daniel Orme,” and “Under the Rose”; and some three dozen poems of varying lengths. Some of these pieces were surely composed late in Melville’s career, during his retirement, but others may date to as early as the 1850s. Except for Billy Budd, many of these works have not been readily available in reliable texts, when available at all.

This volume, the result of the editors’ meticulous study of the manuscripts, offers new reading texts, with significant corrections of words, phrases, and titles, the inclusion of heretofore unpublished lines of verse, and the return to their original locations of the two poems, “The Enviable Isles” and “Pausilippo,” that Melville had extracted for use in John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891). Hershel Parker’s Historical Note traces how these writings fit into the trajectory of Melville’s career, and the rest of the Editorial Appendix presents the scholarly evidence and decisions made in creating the reading texts. As a whole, the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, now complete in fifteen volumes, offers for the first time the total body of Melville’s extant writings in a critical text, faithful to his intentions.

About this title

About the Author:

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891), the American novelist, reviewer, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, worked at various times as a teacher, sailor, farmer, and (for nineteen years) as a customs inspector. He died at seventy-two, in relative obscurity, still in the course of publishing his poetry in small, privately printed editions, and with Billy Budd, Sailor not yet completed.

 

Review:

"At his death, Melville’s unpublished manuscripts were consigned to a metal breadbox, where they lay, undisturbed as the grave, for nearly thirty years. When the unassuming receptacle... was finally opened by the Melville biographer Raymond Weaver in 1919, just in time to help fuel the great Melville revival of the 1920s, it was found to contain a considerable amount of miscellaneous material, which Elizabeth Melville had painstakingly tied 'with pink tape into orderly bundles.' The contents of the bundles are now handsomely housed in the fifteenth and final volume of the majestic Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville’s writings, a project begun in 1965 and completed to coincide with the bicentennial in 2019 of Melville’s birth... The seventy-two pages of Billy Budd are unblemished by scholarly intrusion—no brackets or footnotes or marginal codes... What follows this pristine presentation, however, is more than seven hundred pages of detailed commentary: a historical note by the leading Melville scholar Hershel Parker, a general statement on editorial procedure, and specific notes on every editorial decision, no matter how slight... Billy Budd has, over the years, attracted an extraordinary coterie of admirers." --The New York Review of Books
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0810111144
• ISBN 13: 9780810111141
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1016
• Editor: Tanselle G. Thomas, Hayford Harrison, Parker Hershel, Sandberg Robert, MacDougall Reising Alma