The Piazza Tales (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

Melville, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554813107 ISBN 13: 9781554813100

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2018

Synopsis

Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up “The Encantadas,” as well as three more short stories: “The Piazza,” “The Bell-Tower,” and “The Lightning-Rod Man.” This new edition places these stories in the context of nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free will and determinism, science and technology, and the nature and value of literary artistry. The stories in The Piazza Tales demonstrate the global range of Melville’s cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville set his stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts and Wall Street in the United States to the Pacific coast of South America and southern Europe.

This edition is especially concerned with Melville’s engagement with both political questions related to slavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the short-story tradition as developed by his near-contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Yothers is Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Review:

“At last! Although the stories in The Piazza Tales have been collected and anthologized before, only in this version, with Brian Yothers’s meticulous editing, general introduction, and selection of contextual readings, do we get the book Herman Melville envisioned―for twenty-first-century readers and students. Yothers presents a seasoned novelist, but an experimental writer of tales, laboring within a hectic magazine economy and changing literary history forever. He also exhibits a Melville who responds vigorously to contemporary debates over slavery, urbanization, capitalism, and changing gender roles, and who engages with nineteenth-century science, philosophy, and religion, as well as with a transatlantic cast of canonical and popular authors. Prepare to be delighted and surprised by a Melville you may not have known existed.” ― Wyn Kelley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“In this new Broadview Press edition of Melville’s original 1856 version of The Piazza Tales, Brian Yothers provides a valuable classroom edition that includes reviews, sources and allusions, and other contemporary writings on the art of the story, on slavery and inequality, on science and philosophy, and on other topics of importance to an understanding of the diverse worlds embodied in these tales. Yothers’s illuminating introduction highlights the distinctive character of each of the stories while adroitly placing them in the context of Melville’s personal history and career as a fiction writer and poet, making an eloquent case for reading all six stories together for their imaginative variety and skillful artistry. For teachers of Melville, this compact volume fills a long-standing need.” ― Christopher Sten, George Washington University

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1554813107
• ISBN 13: 9781554813100
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Yothers Brian