Course Detail

Herman Melville achieved brief literary celebrity in the late 1840s as the author of Typee: the “man who lived among the cannibals.” As his artistic ambition grew, his work became less popular; after the moderate successes of Typee and its sequel, Omoo, Melville’s books lost money and were poorly reviewed. Around 1860, he turned from prose to poetry, eventually withdrawing entirely from the literary marketplace. He died in 1891, an “absolutely forgotten man” (according the obit in his hometown paper, The New York Times). In the 1920s the Melville Revival rescued him from the dustbin of history, and Moby-Dick is now widely considered among the greatest novels ever written. In this course we will consider his work in the context of the “global” nineteenth century.