William B. Dillingham

Floyd C. Watkins

Provides explanations of the best practices in writing American English. Topics - located through a tabbing system - include grammar, sentence errors, sentence structure, punctuation, mechanics, diction, style, logic, writing paragraphs, essays and papers. Ancillary package available upon adoption.

Practical English Handbook

An Artist in the Rigging is a study of Herman Melville's early novels--Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket. The author considers these fictions from the standpoint of thematic relationship rather than of chronological development. He shows that while the five hero-narrators are separate and distinct entities, they have much in common and can be seen as representing different facets of an emergent composite hero-from the sensitive and restless young man who leaves home to search hungrily for experience, to the wanderer immersed in a deep probing of himself and his world. The hero's thirst for psychological independence--what comes to be his overriding ambition--is never satisfied, and destruction becomes inevitable, culminating in a paradoxical "apotheosis" in which the narrator-hero achieves this independence, but only at the expense of his humanity. Dillingham persuasively demonstrates the interrelated qualities of these five novels, and in so doing he shows that the young Melville was a far greater literary artist than he gave himself credit for being. This fiction constitutes a powerful achievement in richness of texture, range of effect, and depth of characterization, as An Artist in the Rigging makes clear.

The Early Work of Herman Melville

An Artist in the Rigging

This study treats comprehensively the sixteen short works of fiction that Herman Melville wrote between 1853 and 1856, most of which were published in Harper's and Putnam's magazines. Concentrating on the writer's two basic motivations for writing as he did in these stories, Dillingham argues that Melville created a surface of almost inane congeniality in many of the works, an illusion of vapidity that camouflages a profundity often missed by his readers. He sought to to hide disturbing themes because the magazines for which he was writing would almost certainly have rejected his attempts to be more direct. Dillingham's method is not, however, confined to a reading of the texts. Melville's stories contain so many allusions to the contemporary scene that they constitute in themselves a cultural study. An important contribution of Melville's Short Fiction is its discussion of these allusions. Finally, Dillingham examines the relationship between the short fiction and Melville's own life. Much of the writer's frustration and struggle is concealed in these early works. Melville's friendship with Hawthorne, for example, an intense and yet in some ways disappointing relationship for both men, is explored as an important influence on several of the stories.

Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856

Hennig Cohen

One of the most entertaining genres of American literature is the bold, masculine, wildly exaggerated, and highly imaginative frontier humor of the Old Southwest, produced between 1835 and 1861 in an area that extended from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia westward to Lousiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham have tapped the wealth of this region to produce a collection that over the last three decades has become the standard anthology of Old Southwestern humor. This new, extensively revised edition includes an expanded introduction, a dozen replacement sections, an updated bibliography, and works by three new writers--Phillip B. January, Matthew C. Field, and John Gorman Barr. Most generously represented are George Washington Harris, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Selections from twenty-five authors are featured along with brief biographical essays that combine historical and political analysis with perceptive literary criticism. These selections document important facets of antebellum American culture and provide the background of the literary achievement of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

Humor of the Old Southwest

English Handbook

The confidence-man and alchemy -- Keeping true: Billy Budd, sailor.

Melville's Later Novels

A new appraisal of the life and work of Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885) as a writer of fiction and poetry for both children and adults.

William B. Dillingham

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