Product Description: Washington, D.C., has long been a magnet for writers and an object of interest and fascination to essayists, novelists, and poets. Literary Capital offers a compelling portrait of the city through the work of seventy authors ranging from early Americans such as Abigail Adams and Washington Irving to contemporaries such as Edward P...read more

Product Description: Essays on Melville and the culture of the Pacific"Like the young Melville, those who imagine Polynesia from the perspective of Europe or North America tend to envision a tropical garden set in a shining sea. But the Pacific experienced by a runaway American sailor in an earlier century presents a different picture, and the Pacifi c experienced by indigenous peoples of today a different one yet...read more

Product Description: Sounding the Whale is Christopher Sten's comprehensive account of his own close encounter with Moby-Dick. Originally a long, self-contained chapter in The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel, just published by Kent State University Press, this chapter-by-chapter study of Moby-Dick evolved as a book within a book...read more

Product Description: Melville has long been regarded as an author of raw genius who knew, or cared, little about the art of the novel, and even harbored hostility toward its conventions. In The Weaver-God, He Weaves, Christopher Sten sets out to correct this widespread view, showing not only what Melville knew about the novelist's craft but how he appropriated and transformed a whole series of distinct genres: Typee is presented in the context of the popular romance, with its paired themes of sex and violence; Omoo is viewed in the framework of early Spanish and later French examples of the picaresque novel; and Mardi is seen as an instance of the once widely popular genre of the imaginary voyage...read more

Product Description: Mellville's interest in the visual arts and the translation of that interest into his writings is at the center of this new interdisciplinary study of one of America's most celebrated writers. Melville's lifelong engagement with the visual arts has been noted in other works, but only Savage Eye suggest the extraordinary depth and range of the author's multifaceted interest in the subject...read more