VictorianStudies on theWebCritics Choice Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism is an exploration of two fundamental yet greatly neglected aspects of the author's life and writings: his deep-seated pessimism and his complex creed of heroism. The method of the book is both biographical and critical. Biographically, it traces the roots of Kipling's dark worldview and his search for something to believe in, a way of thinking and acting in defiance of life's hellishness. There matters were more basic to him than any of his social or political opinions, but this the first full-length study devoted to...
VictorianStudies on theWebCritics Choice Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism is an exploration of two fundamental yet greatly neglected aspects of the a...
This study treats comprehensively the sixteen short works of fiction that Herman Melville wrote between 1853 and 1856, most of which were published in "Harper's" and "Putnam's" magazines. Concentrating on the writer's two basic motivations for writing as he did in these stories, Dillingham argues that Melville created a surface of almost inane congeniality in many of the works, an illusion of vapidity that camouflages a profundity often missed by his readers. He sought to to hide disturbing themes because the magazines for which he was writing would almost certainly have rejected his...
This study treats comprehensively the sixteen short works of fiction that Herman Melville wrote between 1853 and 1856, most of which were published...
Herman Melville is a towering figure in American literature--arguably the country's greatest nineteenth-century writer. Revising a number of entrenched misunderstandings about Melville in his later years, this is a remarkable and unprecedented account of the aged author giving himself over to a life of the mind. Focusing exclusively on a period usually associated with the waning of Melville's literary powers, William B. Dillingham shows that he was actually concentrating and intensifying his thoughts on art and creativity to a greater degree than ever before.
Biographers have written...
Herman Melville is a towering figure in American literature--arguably the country's greatest nineteenth-century writer. Revising a number of entren...
Being Kipling exposes Rudyard Kipling s identity as he himself perceived it through the lens of a collection of works composed over a period of years and brought together in the volume Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. Dillingham uses this extraordinary collection, ostensibly put together for the inspiration of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides and frequently ignored by critics and biographers, to offer rare insight into formative events from Kipling s youth that shaped his personality and made him the man and writer that he became. The eight stories, eight poems, and three essays of Land...
Being Kipling exposes Rudyard Kipling s identity as he himself perceived it through the lens of a collection of works composed over a period of years ...
"An Artist in the Rigging" is a study of Herman Melville's early novels--"Typee," "Omoo," "Mardi," "Redburn," and "White-Jacket." The author considers these fictions from the standpoint of thematic relationship rather than of chronological development. He shows that while the five hero-narrators are separate and distinct entities, they have much in common and can be seen as representing different facets of an emergent composite hero-from the sensitive and restless young man who leaves home to search hungrily for experience, to the wanderer immersed in a deep probing of himself and his...
"An Artist in the Rigging" is a study of Herman Melville's early novels--"Typee," "Omoo," "Mardi," "Redburn," and "White-Jacket." The author consid...
