![]() ![]() ![]() MEL’s Versions of Billy Budd gives the reader unprecedented access to the Billy Budd manuscript. These layered manuscript versions along with the variant scholarly transcriptions make Billy Budd Melville’s most complex fluid text. ![]() But the manuscript is far from polished, and its many leaves and leaf fragments reveal a complex revision history in which the narrative evolved through at least three versions and eight stages of composition. At the time of his death in 1891, Melville had “completed” his novella to the extent that its plot and characters had been developed into a coherent whole. It exists as a manuscript that different generations of scholars have transcribed into significantly different print versions. It continues to be a seminal text in fields of literary study worldwide, including law, war, gender, sexuality, and the editing of manuscripts.īut unlike Moby-Dick, which emerged in 1851 in two radically different first editions, Billy Budd was never published in Melville’s lifetime. It has been the center of critical controversies regarding political resistance and Christian acceptance, authority and duty, masculinity and beauty, fathers and sons, romance and irony, and Melville biography. As with Moby-Dick, the novella has devoted readerships in academe, the arts, and the popular culture. Billy Budd, Melville’s last fiction, is his second most familiar work. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |