This book provides a basic guide to the study of the printed matter which has been produced in the United States. The great bulk of research in this field has occurred during the last half century, yet no comprehensive attempt has been made to record it. Recognizing the need for an up-to-date guide to such investigations, G. Thomas Tanselle has compiled a listing of the principal material dealing with printing and publishing in this country.
In his introduction Mr. Tanselle surveys the research which has attempted to trace the history of printing and publishing in America from its...
This book provides a basic guide to the study of the printed matter which has been produced in the United States. The great bulk of research in thi...
Herman Melville wrote "White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War "during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn. Already that same summer Melville had written" Redburn, " and he regarded the books as "two "jobs, " which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on "White-Jacket "as Melville himself was. The English liked its praise of...
Herman Melville wrote "White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War "during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories...
Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities" 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. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as the surviving evidence...
Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities" has since struck ...
Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief,...
Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War ...
Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849). Melville wanted to exploit the "rich poetical material" of Polynesia and also to escape feeling "irked, cramped, & fettered" by a narrative of facts. "I began to feel . . . a longing to plume my pinions for a flight," he told his English publisher. Mardi began as a sequel to Typee (1846) and Omoo...
Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he decla...
"No one writes more knowledgeably or brilliantly about textual criticism than Tanselle." --Washington Post Textual criticism--the traditional term for the task of evaluating the authority of the words and punctuation of a text--is often considered an undertaking preliminary to literary criticism: many people believe that the job of textual critics is to provide reliable texts for literary critics to analyze. G. Thomas Tanselle argues, on the contrary, that the two activities cannot be separated. "These short, lucid, well-written, humane lectures are essential reading for...
"No one writes more knowledgeably or brilliantly about textual criticism than Tanselle." --Washington Post Textual criticism--the traditional t...