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Moby Dick, A Longman Critical Edition
Herman Melville
John Bryant
Haskell Springer

ISBN-10: 0321228006
ISBN-13: 9780321228000

Publisher: Longman
Copyright: 2007
Format: Paper; 688 pp
Published: 12/14/2006
Status: Instock

Suggested retail price: $24.40
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This innovative, scholarly edition of Moby Dick offers unprecedented access to the revisions Herman Melville made to the original 1851 American version of the novel and illuminates all changes which scholars have made to create the classic that readers know today.

The “fluid text” feature illuminates the personal, social, and cultural context of Melville’s work, right on the page, while also offering fresh contextual notes, illustrations, and other apparatus to make this the most reader-friendly — and therefore most teachable — edition available today.

This scholarly edition of Moby Dick offers the complete text of Melville’s novel based on the first American edition, lightly edited to correct original errors and presented in a pleasurable format with generous margins for note-taking.
Revisions sites appear in a gray typeface to indicate text that was later revised, highlighting Melville’s changes, the censorings made by Melville’s British editors, and the choices made by American scholars in the 20^th Century.
Revision narratives tell the stories of selected major textual changes in a distinctive format right on the page where the revision occurred. Each describes the exact revisions Melville or his British editors made to the American text and explains in accessible prose the reason behind each revision. Readers may pause to inspect these “on-page” narratives or continue reading Moby Dick uninterrupted.
"Making Moby Dick: Narratives of Revision" in the back of the book explains numerous additional revisions. Easily located using the thumb index, these citations of the wording surrounding each revision site are highlighted so that readers do not have to flip back to the original context.
An Introduction relates a history of the composition of Moby Dick in the context of Melville’s life, talent, and career as well as an explanation of the revisions made by the author and his editors.
Footnotes provide brief definitions of unusual words and expressions in the context of Melville’s usage and era, while endnotes provide more discursive, non-interpretive explanations of literary allusions and social, political, and cultural references.
A Glossary defines nautical and whaling terms in the context of Melville’s usage in language more accessible to general readers than is found in any other edition.
"Melville’s Sources" lists books that Melville referred to while writing Moby Dick, and a section for Further Reading provides research and secondary resources about Melville and the writing of Moby Dick.
To familiarize today's readers with the subject matter, Illustrations at the back of the book include a beautiful new map of whaling routes created just for our edition and two ship diagrams from Melville’s friend and renowned sailor-author Richard Henry Dana.
Create a customized book specifically tailored to your own American Literature course from a database of more than 1800 selections from the Pearson Custom Library. For more details, please visit http://www.pearsoncustom.com/database/americanlit.html

Introduction and Acknowledgments

A Note on Text and Annotation

Moby Dick; or, The Whale

Explanatory Notes

Making Moby Dick

Revision Narratives

List of In-Text Revision Narratives

Changes Not Discussed

Textual Emendations

Melville’s Sources