Ebook: Ahab's rolling sea: a natural history of ''Moby-Dick
Author: King Richard J., Melville Herman
- Tags: Baleines--Chasse--États-Unis--19e siècle, Melville Herman -- 1819-1891 -- Et la mer, Melville Herman -- 1819-1891 -- Et la nature, Melville Herman -- 1819-1891 -- Moby Dick, Baleines -- Chasse -- États-Unis -- 19e siècle
- Year: 2019
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press
- City: Chicago
- Language: English
- epub
Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consider it a work of nature writing—or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the "best book ever written about nature," and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael's sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851.
A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J....