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English 350-882-001 Seminar in 19th Century American Literature: Later Works of Herman Melville Instr:
James A. Sappenfield
Course Information:
W 4:30-7:10 pm CRT 466
Course Description Study of Melville’s writing from 1851 to 1891. Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Piazza Tales and other magazine pieces, The Confidence-Man, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, Clarel, the later lyric poetry, and “Billy Budd, Sailor.” This is the long and certainly sorrowful twilight of Melville’s career as a fiction writer and poet, marked by the Civil War, the suicide of his son, Malcolm, in 1867, and the obscurity of his job as customs inspector in Manhattan. The first “half” of Melville’s life as an author was only the five years between 1846 (Typee) and Moby-Dick; his development as an artist and intellectual was explosive during that half-decade, but it didn’t stop with the reversals of his professional fortunes. The texts of Melville’s last forty years are some of the richest and most challenging of the late nineteenth century—in any of the western literatures. Much remains to be said about his poetry and its place in the canon of English poetry of the late Victorian era. Students will be encouraged to write seminar papers not only on
Melville’s writing but on that of his contemporaries both American and
British: Hawthorne, Dickinson, Whitman, Arnold, Hardy.
Thus, the seminar can be the point of departure for a range of studies
in the last half of the nineteenth century.
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