San Antonio College Library

"Taking its inspiration - and, for that matter, its form - from Ishmael's abandoned "Cetological Dictionary" in Moby-Dick, this extraordinary, highly original work brings meditations on myth, representation, language, nature, consciousness, and notions of spiritual quest into constantly new relations. From "Accuracy" to "Wound," from "Adam" to "Void," and from "Babel" to "Silence," the cross-referential, highly associative entries make up an utterly...

Shares expert guidelines on how to read and appreciate Herman Melville's classic work, offering insight into its history, characters, and themes while explaining its literary relevance in the modern world.

Essays to help you understand and appreciate Melville's novel, Moby Dick, and especially the character Captain Ahab.

After the Whale contextualizes Herman Melville's short fiction and poetry by studying it in the company of the more familiar fiction of the 1850s and 1890s. The study focuses on Melville's vision of the purpose and function of language from Moby-Dick through Billy Budd with a special emphasis on how language - in function and form - follows and depends on the function and form of the body, how Melville's attitude toward words echoes his attitude toward...

"In Whipscars and Tattoos, Geoffrey Sanborn dramatically transforms the standard interpretations of two of the most important novels in American literary history. On the basis of original scholarship showing that Magua, the supposed villain of The Last of the Mohicans, and Queequeg, the supposed emblem of love in Moby-Dick, are based on Maori chiefs, Sanborn argues that each character is, above all else, an embodiment of the fiercely majestic qualities...

This book collects the prints and other images of whales and whaling referred to in the three "pictorial" chapters of Moby-Dick together with Melville's words.