...Robert Merrill Copyright © 1973 by Duke University Press 1973 THE NARRATIVE VOICE IN BILLY BUDD By ROBERTMERRILL The possible interpretations of Billy Budd have been argued and reargued for more than forty years.’ New readings must...

...Phil Withim Copyright © 1959 by Duke University Press 1959 BILLY BUDD: TESTAMENT OF RESISTANCE By PHILWITHIM When E. L. G. Watson wrote his famous article, “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance,” he made no attempt to prove his view. All...

...: Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Silly Budd. A comparison of their readings of Silly Budd reveals not only the inevitable pitfalls of a thesis-bound critical method, but also the coercive nature of the new orthodoxy settling into the academy. I...

... mastered the com- mon techniques of fiction.“lHis early works were strongly autobio- graphical, and, once he had found his theme, his knowledge of the craft of fiction was no match for his vision of metaphysical immensity. His later works, from Moby-Dick to Budd,Billy provide ample evidence...

..., although he cannot keep away from them, Melville is so little interested in them. The death scene of Billy Budd is related to Under the Rose, the last of the sketches to be discussed here, in theme but not in imagery. Nor, except for The Lightning-rod Man and the description (in The Encantadus...

... might say that Billy Budd has avoided the Oedipus struggle by forming an attachment to the mother at the prephallic level of ‘oral eroticism’ and has allayed his fears of castration by symbolically castrating himself (by being consciously submissive) and by repressing his rage...

... protagonists are suicidal, from Tommo to Billy Budd. Such characters as Taji, Ahab, and Pierre are obviously suicides, but the death urge is apparent in all of Mel- ville’s other protagonists, even if it shows itself symbolically or in an oblique manner. Benito Cereno, Bartleby, and Billy Budd...

.... Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Capricorn Books, CAP 13, 1959. Pp. viii + 88. $0.95. CORRECTION The correct title for the article by Phil Withim (see the June, 1959, issue) is “Billy Budd: Testament...

... observed. According to Flaubert, “There are three things required for happiness—good health, selŽshness, and stupidity—and without stupidity the others are useless.” Billy Budd was stupid. So, of course, were Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy. “I don’t know what...

..., at the prospect of Hawthorne compressed into a continuity with George Washington Harris and Henry Clay Lewis; or at the guideposts to Melville’s “descent to faith” planted by the author in “the comedy of love” of Queequeg and Ishmael (p. 101) and in “the jokes in Billy Budd” (pp. 130-32). Finally...

... The correct title for the article by Phil Withim (see the June, 1959, issue) is “Billy Budd: Testament of Resistance,” as given at the head of the article. ...

... 61 assign that routine piece of anonymous prose, “The Death Craft,” to Melville? Was Billy Budd in fact ever completed? Are the first people Tommo sees in the Typee Valley “near-naked lovers” (p. 36) or merely a boy and a girl? Precisely how often, say between 1832 and 1841, did Lemuel...

... had no “organic relevance to the total effect’’ of that novel, that these two chapters were added to their places in the manuscript at a later date than the original composition. He could have used material from Philip Foner’s Mark Twain: Social Critic or Louis Budd’s Mark Twain...

..., Tristram P. The British Traditional Ballad in North America. Phila- delphia: American Folklore Society, 1950. Pp. xvi + 188. $4.50. Coxe, Louis O., and Robert Chapman. Billy Budd : A Play in Three Acts. Based on a Novel by Herman Melville. With a Foreword by Brooks Atkinson. Princeton...

... of his stances toward solidifications of secular authority as they play out during his career, paying particular attention to the pluralism of a poem like Clarel as it devolves toward the more keenly tragic sense of a tale like Billy Budd . 6 My reading here, keyed to a public sphere...

..., 1985. xiii + 238 pp. $15.00. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (editor). New Essays on “The Great Gatsby.” Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, The American Novel, 1985. viii + 120 pp. $19.95, cloth; $6.95, paper. Budd, Louis J. (editor). New Essays on “Huckleberry Finn.” Cambridge...

..., never decisive agents. Moody B Review 417 For all this, there are two knotty problems in Arac’s book. The first is its sometimes excessive bluntness, not to say acerbity. I support Louis J. Budd’s contention, in a back-cover blurb, that “Arac...

... State Series in German Literature, 1981. xvi + 191 pp. $1’7.50. Budd, John (compiler). Eight Scandinavian Novelists: Criticism and Reviews in English. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. x + 180 pp. $25.00. Kalcher, Joachim. Perspektiven des Lebens in der Dramatik um 1900. Cologne and Vi...

... imagination in me.” Rex Warner points to the symbolic speech and world of double meanings in his introduction to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and Other Stories, e.g., about tortoises : “they seemed newly crawled forth beneath the foundations of the world” (the Enchantadas of Enchanted Isles...

... on his last and bitterest novel, Billy Budd. It probably stirred Jonson deeply to find an irrepressible comic imagination like his own, whenever that happy event occurred. Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind, a wholly different kind of book, attempts to tease out the implications...