Hershel Parker's Books

Melville Biography

An Inside Narrative

By: Hershel Parker

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Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimizing his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the "divine amateurs" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.

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609

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810127091

ISBN 13

9780810127098

Herman Melville: 1819-1851

By: Hershel Parker

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Herman Melville: 1819-1851

By: Hershel Parker

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.

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1014

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801854288

ISBN 13

9780801854286

Herman Melville

A Biography

By: Hershel Parker

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Herman Melville

A Biography

By: Hershel Parker

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.

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1052

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801881862

ISBN 13

9780801881862

Melville

The Making of the Poet

By: Hershel Parker

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Melville

The Making of the Poet

By: Hershel Parker

Revealed here is an unknown Melville, the autodidact who made himself a poet and who brilliantly constructed a personal aesthetic credo. Dispelling baseless claims that Melville had a quarrel with fiction after Moby-Dick (or Pierre) and that he did not, in 1860, complete a book he called Poems, Parker offers new evidence of the full trajectory of Melville's career in all its glory and frustration."--BOOK JACKET.

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250

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810124645

ISBN 13

9780810124646

Checklist of Melville Reviews

By: Kevin J. Hayes,Hershel Parker

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Checklist of Melville Reviews

By: Kevin J. Hayes,Hershel Parker

This 1992 edition includes every Melville review discovered up to now, and cites modern reprints of the reviews. Also included is a new section of reviews of the lectures Melville gave in the 1850s.

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194

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810110288

ISBN 13

9780810110281

Herman Melville: 1851-1891

By: Hershel Parker

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Herman Melville: 1851-1891

By: Hershel Parker

Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. Illustrations.

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1072

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801868920

ISBN 13

9780801868924

The Powell Papers

A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati

By: Hershel Parker

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The Powell Papers

A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati

By: Hershel Parker

In 1849—months before the term “confidence man” was coined to identify a New York crook—Thomas Powell (1809–1887), a spherical, monocled, English poetaster, dramatist, journalist, embezzler, and forger, landed in Manhattan. Powell in London had capped a career of grand theft and literary peccadilloes by feigning a suicide attempt and having himself committed to a madhouse, after which he fled England. He had been an intimate of William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and a crowd of lesser literary folk. Thoughtfully bearing what he presented as a volume of Tennyson with a few trifling revisions in the hand of the poet, Powell was embraced by the slavishly Anglophile New York literary establishment, including a young Herman Melville. In two pot-boilers—The Living Authors of England (1849) and The Living Authors of America (1850)—Powell denounced the most revered American author, Washington Irving, for plagiarism; provoked Charles Dickens to vengeful trans-Atlantic outrage and then panic; and capped his insolence by identified Irving and Melville as the two worst “enemies of the American mind.” For almost four more decades he sniped at Dickens, put words in Melville’s mouth, and survived even the most conscientious efforts to expose him. Long fascinated by this incorrigible rogue, Hershel Parker in The Powell Papers uses a few familiar documents and a mass of freshly discovered material (including a devastating portrait of Powell in a serialized novel) to unfold a captivating tale of skullduggery through the words of great artists and then-admired journalists alike.

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362

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810127032

ISBN 13

9780810127036

Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons

Literary Authority in American Fiction

By: Hershel Parker

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Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons

Literary Authority in American Fiction

By: Hershel Parker

An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary works by authors such as James, Crane, and Mailer.

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276

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810106671

ISBN 13

9780810106673

Melville Biography

An Inside Narrative

By: Hershel Parker

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Melville Biography

An Inside Narrative

By: Hershel Parker

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609

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Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810127091

ISBN 13

9780810127098

Herman Melville: 1851-1891

By: Hershel Parker

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Herman Melville: 1851-1891

By: Hershel Parker

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1072

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JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801868920

ISBN 13

9780801868924

Herman Melville

A Biography

By: Hershel Parker

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Herman Melville

A Biography

By: Hershel Parker

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.

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1070

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801881862

ISBN 13

9780801881862

Melville

The Making of the Poet

By: Hershel Parker

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Melville

The Making of the Poet

By: Hershel Parker

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250

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Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810124645

ISBN 13

9780810124646

Reading Melville's Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

By: Brian Higgins,Hershel Parker

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Reading Melville's Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities

By: Brian Higgins,Hershel Parker

This engaging new study uses biographical evidence to explore Pierre, the puzzling novel that Herman Melville wrote immediately after the publication of Moby-Dick. Parker and Higgins reveal that Melville drastically altered the end of the novel after a troubling meeting with his publisher and editor about the perceived failure of Moby-Dick. Melville re-wrote Pierre's protagonist as a writer and used the novel to attack the publishing industry. Parker and Higgins' exploration into Pierre shows that this is a deeply flawed novel, but an intriguing and revealing glimpse into the mind of an American literary giant.

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Page Count

237

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807135682

ISBN 13

9780807135686

Checklist of Melville Reviews

By: Kevin J. Hayes,Hershel Parker

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Checklist of Melville Reviews

By: Kevin J. Hayes,Hershel Parker

This 1992 edition includes every Melville review discovered up to now, and cites modern reprints of the reviews. Also included is a new section of reviews of the lectures Melville gave in the 1850s.

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194

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810110288

ISBN 13

9780810110281

Published Poems

The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11

By: Herman Melville,Robert Charles Ryan,Hershel Parker

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Published Poems

The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11

By: Herman Melville,Robert Charles Ryan,Hershel Parker

Although he surprised the world in 1866 with his first published book of poetry, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, Herman Melville had long been steeped in poetry. This new offering in the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry series, The Writings of Herman Melville, with a historical note by Hershel Parker, is testament to Melville the poet. Penultimate in the publication of the series, Published Poems follows the release of Melville’s verse epic, Clarel (1876), and with it, contains the entirety of the poems published during Melville’s lifetime: Battle-Pieces, as well as John Marr and Other Sailors, with Some Sea-Pieces (1888), and Timoleon Etc. (1891). Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War has long been recognized as a great contribution to the poetry of the Civil War, comparable only to Whitman’s Drum-Taps. Its idiosyncrasies, many of them grounded in British poetry, kept it from immediate popularity, but it was not the production of a novice. Melville had made himself over into a poet in the late 1850s and had tried to publish a previous collection of poetry—now lost—in 1860. John Marr and Other Sailors is a retrospective nautical book. Its portraits of sailors were influenced by Melville’s own experience of aging as well as by his long acquaintance with wasted mariners at the Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island, where his brother was governor. The book modulates into "Sea-Pieces," including the grisly "Maldive Shark" and "To Ned," a powerful reflection on how Melville’s personal adventures with the Typee islanders in 1842 had accrued rich historical significance over the decades. Thematically less unified, Timoleon Etc. contains poems with many European and exotic settings from ancient to modern times. The most famous are "After the Pleasure Party" and "The Age of the Antonines." Published in the last year of Melville’s life, some of the poems were first written many years earlier; for example, Melville copied "The Age of the Antonines" out for his brother-in-law in 1877, describing it as something found in a bundle of old papers. One whole section seems to have been almost entirely salvaged from the unpublished 1860 volume of poetry. As with the other volumes in the Northwestern-Newberry series, the aim of this edition of Published Poems is to present a text as close to the author’s intention as surviving evidence permits. To that end, the editorial appendix includes a historical note by Hershel Parker, the dean of Melville scholars, which gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America’s greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet; an essay by G. Thomas Tanselle on the printing and publishing history of the works in Published Poems; a textual record that identifies the copy-texts for the present edition and explains the editorial policy; and substantial scholarly notes on individual poems.

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961

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810111128

ISBN 13

9780810111127

Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons

Literary Authority in American Fiction

By: Hershel Parker

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Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons

Literary Authority in American Fiction

By: Hershel Parker

An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary works by authors such as James, Crane, and Mailer.

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276

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810106671

ISBN 13

9780810106673

The Powell Papers

A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati

By: Hershel Parker

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The Powell Papers

A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati

By: Hershel Parker

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362

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810127032

ISBN 13

9780810127036

Reading Billy Budd

By: Hershel Parker

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Reading Billy Budd

By: Hershel Parker

In this study of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, renowned Melville scholar Hershel Parker provides the fullest introduction to and analysis of this work to date. It is the first complete reading of Billy Budd to draw on the definitive but neglected Hayford-Sealts Genetic Text. For the first time, it places Billy Budd in the context of Melville's writings and projects of the last decade of his life; and it is the first to present the work as a product of the post-Gilded Age and fin-de-siecle period rather than of the mid-century high romanticism of Moby-Dick.

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204

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081010962X

ISBN 13

9780810109629

Herman Melville: 1819-1851

By: Hershel Parker

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Herman Melville: 1819-1851

By: Hershel Parker

Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity.

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1014

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801854288

ISBN 13

9780801854286

Published Poems

The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11

By: Herman Melville,Robert Charles Ryan,Hershel Parker

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Published Poems

The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11

By: Herman Melville,Robert Charles Ryan,Hershel Parker

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961

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810111128

ISBN 13

9780810111127

Vander's Human Physiology

The Mechanisms of Body Function

By: Eric P. Widmaier,Hershel Raff,Kevin T. Strang

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Vander's Human Physiology

The Mechanisms of Body Function

By: Eric P. Widmaier,Hershel Raff,Kevin T. Strang

The fundamental purpose of this textbook is to present the principles and facts of human physiology in a format that is suitable for undergraduates regardless of academic background or field of study. The eleventh edition, carries on the tradition of clarity and accuracy, while refining and updating the content to meet the needs of today's instructors and students. The eleventh edition features a streamlined, clinically oriented focus to the study of human body systems. It has also responded to reviewer requests for more clinical applications. Chapter 19 is new and contains three complete case studies. Physiology Inquiries have also been added to many figures throughout the chapters.

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808

Publisher

McGraw-Hill

Published Date

ISBN 10

007304962X

ISBN 13

9780073049625

Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

By: Brian Higgins,Hershel Parker

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Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

By: Brian Higgins,Hershel Parker

Herman Melville's Pierre; or. The Ambiguities has a storied place in the history of American publishing. Melville began writing this follow-up to Moby-Dick in October 1851, thinking that it might prove even more significant than its predecessor. The 1852 publication of Pierre was catastrophic, however. Melville lost his English publisher, and American reviewers derided the book and called the author mad. InReading Melville's "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," noted Melville authorities Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker probe the daunting story behind a deeply flawed but revealing work, one that directly reflects the major crisis of Melville's authorial life. Weighed down by huge debts, Melville took the manuscript of Pierre to his New York publisher, Harper and Brothers, desperately needing the new work to be a financial success. The Harpers balked at publishing such a dangerous psychological novel (incest was a theme) and offered him less than half the royalties they had paid for his previous books. The anguished Melville accepted the contract but subsequently added new passages to his manuscript -- passages that disparage the publishing industry and reflect his agony at the looming loss of his career. Higgins and Parker examine what can plausibly be reconstructed of Melville's original version of Pierreand explore the consequences of his belated decision to expand his work, showing in detail how his hastily written and awkwardly inserted additions marred much of what he had brilliantly achieved in the shorter version. They demonstrate that to understand Pierre, and Melville himself at this crisis, one must first understand the compositional history that resulted in the book as published. Setting Pierre in the context of Melville's literary life, Higgins and Parker's study is an illuminating demonstration of biographical and textual scholarship by two of the field's finest practitioners.

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288

Publisher

LSU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807149063

ISBN 13

9780807149065

Moby-Dick

Or, The Whale

By: Herman Melville,Harrison Hayford,Hershel Parker

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Moby-Dick

Or, The Whale

By: Herman Melville,Harrison Hayford,Hershel Parker

The Arion Press "Moby-Dick, " published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies, has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of "Moby-Dick" used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. Now this magnificently typeset and illustrated edition of the great American novel is available for all lovers of beautiful books. This luxurious edition of "Moby Dick" is limited to 750 numbered copies. It is bound in cloth and slipcased in a cloth-covered box. The text is printed in two colors throughout on a 75-pound beautifully textured paper.

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Page Count

585

Publisher

W. W. Norton

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393044025

ISBN 13

9780393044027

Clarel

A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

By: Herman Melville,Hershel Parker

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Clarel

A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

By: Herman Melville,Hershel Parker

Melville’s long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville’s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions. But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville’s inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Clarel is one of the most complex theological explorations of faith and doubt in all of American literature, and this edition brings Melville’s poem to new life.

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Page Count

499

Published Date

ISBN 10

0773751920

ISBN 13

9780773751927

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