Melville / Hoffmann Herman Melville Collected Works

anboco
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-3-7364-0408-3
Verlag: anboco
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 9800 Seiten

Embark on a literary voyage with Hermann Melville, the scribe of the seas, whose pen charted the depths of the human condition. His masterwork, 'Moby-Dick,' is not merely a tale but an odyssey that grips the soul and plunges you into the tumultuous waters of obsession and the unknown. Rediscover the Classics: 'Moby-Dick': A battle against the unfathomable, a journey that will anchor in your memory, 'Bartleby, the Scrivener': A narrative of defiance against life's drudgery, 'Billy Budd': A profound drama of innocence and justice on the high seas. This e-book presents the works of this famous and brilliant writer: - Moby Dick; Or, The Whale - Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street - Billy Budd, Foretopman - The Piazza Tales - The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade - Typee: A Romance of the South Seas - Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War - Pierre; or The Ambiguities - Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas - Redburn -The Apple-Tree Table, and Other Sketches - The Chase - Typee - I and My Chimney - Mardi: and A Voyage Thither - Israel Potter - John Marr and Other Poems - I and my Chimney - Typee - Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas - Sea Pieces - Poems From Timoleon - White Jacket; Or, The World on a Man-of-War etc. Melville's works are essential for every bibliophile. His works offer profound insights and timeless themes, wrapped in captivating storytelling. Prepare for a reading experience that will challenge and inspire you. Read Melville - unleash your imagination.

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) - American writer, poet and essayist: Melville's first novel, Typee, is about the journey of two deserters through the South Seas. The adventure novel met the taste of the time, despite its criticism of colonialism and its unreserved portrayal of the indigenous peoples. The royalties from the subsequent novel Omoo eventually enabled him to marry Elizabeth Shaw. The novel Mardi and a Journey There was published in 1847. Melville himself saw his third work as the turning point in his work. Following the escape of two sailors, the South Sea adventure develops into a journey of the soul and cosmogony and ends in an allegorical satire in which he caricatures the futility of the nation-state's striving for power. The numerous discourses, the accumulation of descriptions, the rich linguistic and stylistic variation as well as the depiction of mental and physical processes, which show the hopelessness and absurdity but also the tragedy of the protagonist, allow the totality of the epic to reappear in the modern novel. In the two works that followed, Redburn and Whitejacket or the World on a Warship, Melville chose the ship as a microcosm. Although he later devalued both works due to their supposed lack of linguistic power, not least because of their lower density of innovation compared to the previous novel, they can be read as an intensification and streamlining of their predecessor. In contrast to Mardi, the main characters are not merely drawn as allegories or representatives of ideas, but are tangible as characters, and in the white jacket of the nameless sailor, Melville for the first time captures the symbol of nothingness, as later in the whale Moby Dick. As maritime novels, they are among the author's most accessible works due to their realism. In his novel Moby-Dick or the White Whale, he wrote the tragic epic of the anti-hero Ahab in the fable of a whale hunt, who chooses to perish in search of revenge on the man who caused his severed lower leg. The novel is one of the most important works of American literature and, due to its formal and stylistic innovations, is cited as a precursor to numerous novels of classical modernism that were only published in the 20th century. The novel is one of the most important works of world literature. Mardi and Moby Dick again failed to achieve financial success. This was not least a reaction to his narrative idiosyncrasy and audacious choice of subject - the subsequent marriage novel Pierre or the Ambiguities deals with sibling incest - although his stories, which appeared in 1856 under the title The Piazza Tales, were praised by contemporaries as literary achievements. The six stories, including The Piazza, Bartleby the Scribe, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas, once again show Melville to be a great innovator of American prose and an outstanding representative of world literature. Melville's last novel, The Confidence-Man, was published in 1857. The former seafarer had to work as a customs officer in New York harbor until his retirement due to his low income. Late in life, he wrote his first volume of poetry. This was followed by the verse epic Clarel and the poetry collection John Marr and Other Sailors. His last work, the posthumously published novella Billy Budd, achieved worldwide fame. Melville's poetry, which, like his middle and late novels, is oriented towards the poetic theorem of blackness, heroism in the modern age and the totality of the epic and deals with borderline areas of the soul such as pain, delusion, suffering and the desire for redemption, is classified as hermeticism.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Melville, Herman

Hoffmann, André

Leseproben

By Herman Melville.

1866.

[With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed.

The events and incidents of the conflict—making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war—from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind.

The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward wilds have played upon the strings.]

The Portent.

(1859.)

Hanging from the beam,

Slowly swaying (such the law),

Gaunt the shadow on your green,

Shenandoah!

The cut is on the crown

(Lo, John Brown),

And the stabs shall heal no more.

Hidden in the cap

Is the anguish none can draw;

So your future veils its face,

Shenandoah!

But the streaming beard is shown

(Weird John Brown),

The meteor of the the war.

Misgivings.

(1860.)

When ocean-clouds over inland hills

Sweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,

And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

Nature’s dark side is heeded now—

(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—

A child may read the moody brow

Of yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,

And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:

The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

The Conflict of Convictions

(1860-1.)

On starry heights

A bugle wails the long recall;

Derision stirs the deep abyss,

Heaven’s ominous silence over all.

Return, return, O eager Hope,

And face man’s latter fall.

Events, they make the dreamers quail;

Satan’s old age is strong and hale,

A disciplined captain, gray in skill,

And Raphael a white enthusiast still;

Dashed aims, at which Christ’s martyrs pale,

Shall Mammon’s slaves fulfill?

(Dismantle the fort,

Cut down the fleet—

Battle no more shall be!

While the fields for fight in æons to come

Congeal beneath the sea.)

The terrors of truth and dart of death

To faith alike are vain;

Though comets, gone a thousand years,

Return again,

Patient she stands—she can no more—

And waits, nor heeds she waxes hoar.

(At a stony gate,

A statue of stone,

Weed overgrown—

Long ’twill wait!)

But God his former mind retains,

Confirms his old decree;

The generations are inured to pains,

And strong Necessity

Surges, and heaps Time’s strand with wrecks.

The People spread like a weedy grass,

The thing they will they bring to pass,

And prosper to the apoplex.

The rout it herds around the heart,

The ghost is yielded in the gloom;

Kings wag their heads—Now save thyself

Who wouldst rebuild the world in bloom.

(Tide-mark

And top of the ages’ strike,

Verge where they called the world to come,

The last advance of life—

Ha ha, the rust on the Iron Dome!)

Nay, but revere the hid event;

In the cloud a sword is girded on,

I mark a twinkling in the tent

Of Michael the warrior one.

Senior wisdom suits not now,

The light is on the youthful brow.

(Ay, in caves the miner see:

His forehead bears a blinking light;

Darkness so he feebly braves—

A meagre wight!)

But He who rules is old—is old;

Ah! faith is warm, but heaven with age is cold.

(Ho ho, ho ho,

The cloistered doubt

Of olden times

Is blurted out!)

The Ancient of Days forever is young,

Forever the scheme of Nature thrives;

I know a wind in purpose strong—

It spins against the way it drives.

What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare?

So deep must the stones be hurled

Whereon the throes of ages rear

The final empire and the happier world.

(The poor old Past,

The Future’s slave,

She drudged through pain and crime

To bring about the blissful Prime,

Then—perished. There’s a grave!)

Power unanointed may come—

Dominion (unsought by the free)

And the Iron Dome,

Stronger for stress and strain,

Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;

But the Founders’ dream shall flee.

Agee after age shall be

As age after age has been,

(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);

And death be busy with all who strive—

Death, with silent negative.

Yea, and Nay—

Each hath his say;

But God He keeps the middle way.

None was by

When He spread the sky;

Wisdom is vain, and prophesy.

Apathy and Enthusiasm.

(1860-1.)

I.

O the clammy cold November,

And the winter white and dead,

And the terror dumb with stupor,

And the sky a sheet of lead;

And events that came resounding

With the cry that All was lost,

Like the thunder-cracks of massy ice

In intensity of frost—

Bursting one upon another

Through the horror of the calm.

The paralysis of arm

In the anguish of the heart;

And the hollowness and dearth.

The appealings of the mother

To brother and to brother

Not in hatred so to part—

And the fissure in the...