Call Me Ishmael

Title: Call Me Ishmael
Author: Charles Olson
ISBN: 9780801857317
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1997
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: 60532nd
Number of Pages: 164
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description:

One of the most stimulating essays ever written on Moby Dick, and for that matter on any piece of literature, and the forces behind it."--San Francisco Chronicle

First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences--especially Shakespearean ones--on Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville's reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: "the first book did not contain Ahab," writes Olson, and "it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick." If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy.