The Moral World of Billy Budd sees the novel not as inviting us to choose between the testament of acceptance and the testament of resistance, those views that, respectively, support and critique Captain Vere but rather as challenging us to experience the difficulty of making decisions in the world. The first part is devoted to an intensive examination of the evolution of the two testaments, including analyses of the three book-length studies of the novel, climaxing with Wenke s argument that the Genetic Text shows the novel s active pursuit of ambiguity. The second part analyzes the...

This collection of essays demonstrates that using fiction, poetry, and drama in the classroom provides students with the best opportunity to learn about thinking, writing, and life at their deepest levels. Several of the contributors have worked or studied at Ridgeview Classical School in Fort Collins, Colorado. E. D. Hirsch, in The Making of Americans, has said of this school that its success -stands as a sharp rebuke to the anti-intellectual pedagogy of most American schools-. Within this volume, readers will also encounter essays by teachers who have not worked at Ridgeview but...