Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Call Me Ishmael

Call Me Ishmael

Olson, Charles
Sealts, Merton M., Jr.

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0801857317
ISBN13: 9780801857317
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: Nov 28 1997
Pages: 164
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.41 Width: 6.02 Depth: 8.38
Language: English

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.

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