After the Whale Melville in the Wake of MobyDick by Clark Davis PAPERBACK

The University of Alabama Press

After the WhaleMelville in the Wake of Moby-Dick\nAuthor(s): Clark Davis\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: The University of Alabama Press, United States\nImprint: The University of Alabama Press\nISBN-13: 9780817360719, 978-0817360719\nSynopsis\nContextualizes Herman Melville's short fiction and poetry by studying it in the company of the more familiar fiction of the 1850s era\n The study focuses on Melville's vision of the purpose and function of language from Moby-Dick through Billy Budd with a special emphasis on how language-in function and form-follows and depends on the function and form of the body, how Melville's attitude toward words echoes his attitude toward fish. Davis begins by locating and describing the fundamental dialectic formulated in Moby-Dick in the characters of Ahab and Ishmael. This dialectic produces two visions of bodily reality and two corresponding visions of language: Ahab's, in which language is both weapon and substitute body, and Ishmael's, in which lang.