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
Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine

Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine

Milder, Robert

Paperback

Biographies GeneralLiterary CriticismLinguistics

ISBN10: 019533910X
ISBN13: 9780195339109
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jan 14 2009
Pages: 312
Weight: 0.97
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. The ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that Melville's work, as Charles Olson said, must be left in his own 'life, ' which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. The title essay takes its origin from Ishmael's account of the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab, Melville's mythic projection of his own feelings of emotional and ontological disinheritance. How to live nobly in spiritual exile-to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God-was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. Exiled Royalties explores the ways in which Melville satisfied this impulse throughout his forty-five year career, how it shaped the matter and manner of his work, and how his writing, in turn, reflexively bore upon his private life and upon the life of the nation.

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