Melville S Mirrors

An accessible and highly readable guide to the story of Melville criticism as it has developed over the past century and a half.

A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining masterpiece hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "Audaciously well written...the book I was raving about to my friends before I'd even finished it." Publishers Weekly raved that "with near-universal appeal . . . Seay’s debut novel is a true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story." Set in three cities in three eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado. The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . . Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . . All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

The confidence-man and alchemy -- Keeping true: Billy Budd, sailor.

This book is the first to consider the work of Herman Melville's later years as a whole, in the light of his life and reading during those years and of the intellectual and artistic ambience of the later nineteenth century. With the exception of Billy Budd, almost all of the writing Melville produced between 1857 and 1891 is poetry. Until now little attention has been given to the poetry and it has been customary to view Melville's final masterpiece, Billy Budd, against the background of the earlier fiction -- almost as if the writing of the intervening thirty-four years had not existed. William H. Shurr, who has studied the poems with close attention to the Melville manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, contends that Melville's poetry merits more attention and appreciation than has hitherto been accorded it. Concerned principally with the maturation of Melville's darker themes, he has been the first to study the carefully designed sequences in which Melville published his poems. He has also discovered in the poems thematic patterns -- among them Melville's heterodox Christology and his concept of a particular kind of individualism found in what he calls the "transcendent act" -- that shed new light on the complexities of Billy Budd.

Herman Melville is one of the most challenging authors of American literature. Known primarily as the author of Moby-Dick, he wrote several other novels, short stories, and poems. With the rise of interest in Melville in the 20th century, critical and biographical studies of Melville continue to be published at an ever-increasing rate. This encyclopedia is a comprehensive guide to Melville's rich and complex literary career. The volume includes several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for all of Melville's works and characters, and for his family members, friends, and acquaintances. Entries on the most important topics include bibliographies. The encyclopedia is more factual than critical, but scholarship from 1990 and beyond is emphasized throughout. The book also gives special attention to the 19th-century women who influenced Melville, for these women have often been overlooked. A chronology overviews the principal events in Melville's life, and a selected bibliography lists major studies.

Containing original essays; historical narratives, biographical memoirs, sketches of society, topographical descriptions, novels and tales, anecdotes, select extracts from new and expensive works, the spirit of the public journals, discoveries in the arts and sciences, useful domestic hints, etc. etc. etc.