Call Me Ishmael

One of the most stimulating essays ever written on Moby Dick, and for that matter on any piece of literature, and the forces behind it."--San Francisco Chronicle

First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influences--especially Shakespearean ones--on Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville's reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: "the first book did not contain Ahab," writes Olson, and "it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick." If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy.

Author: Charles Olson
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 11/28/1997
Pages: 164
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.52lbs
Size: 8.38h x 6.02w x 0.41d
ISBN13: 9780801857317
ISBN10: 0801857317
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

About the Author

Charles Olson (1910-1970), an avant garde poet, literary critic, and literary theorist, is the author of The Maximus Poems, The Distances, The Human Universe and Other Essays, and In Cold Hell, in Thicket.