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Chargement... Israël Potterpar Herman Melville
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Classic Literature.
Fiction.
HTML: Best known for producing one of the masterworks of American literature, the novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also branched out into many other genres of writing over the course of his career. The novella Israel Potter: His Fifty Years in Exile was initially published in serial form in a magazine. It offers a fictionalized account of an American-born man whose remarkable life included time spent as a soldier, sailor, prisoner, spy, laborer, and street peddler. .Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.3Literature English (North America) American fiction Middle 19th Century 1830-1861Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Despite Melville's best efforts to make the book unexceptional, he sometimes cannot help himself. We see him playing with some of the same themes that obsessed him in Pierre, including questions of what it is to be an American and what our relation to western and broader cultures is. Here and there, he recognizes the fecundity of exile as a theme, and begins to surface some thoughts of physicial poverty and spiritual impoverishment. There are moments - some good lines where the wit shows through, some moments when he steps back to ruminate on a scene, some occassional surfacing of the great doubter and his chuckling despair over God's inability to contain his sense of irony.
Overall, Melville keeps the flashes of brilliance (and the dark humor) under control in the interests of pleasing the public, something the book still failed to do. Perhaps, as in Typee, they really needed a few tweaks at the authorities, a few little bits of maliciousness toward the church, to keep their interest.
The book is a good straightforward read, quickly digested in an afternoon (in my case, on a plane). The material compiled in the Scholarly Edition has a tendancy to veer off and focus on the books and stories surrounding Israel Potter (Pierre, the Confidence Man, some of the Piazza Tales), revealing the editors general inability to deeply engage with this work. ( )