Herman Melville
Paperback | Pages: 288 pages Rating: 3.78 | 696 Users | 87 Reviews
Describe Books Supposing White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War
| Original Title: | White Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War |
| ISBN: | 1495974219 (ISBN13: 9781495974212) |
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Herman Melville wrote White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn.Already that same summer Melville had written Redburn, and he regarded the books as "two jobs, which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on White-Jacket as Melville himself was. The English liked its praise of British seamen. The Americans were more interested in Melville's attack on naval abuses, particularly flogging, and his advocacy of humanitarian causes. Soon Melville was acclaimed the best sea writer of the day.
Part autobiography, part epic fiction, White-Jacket remains a brilliantly imaginative social novel by one of the great writers of the sea. This text of the novel is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
Point About Books White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War
| Title | : | White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War |
| Author | : | Herman Melville |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 288 pages |
| Published | : | February 17th 2014 by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform (first published 1849) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Adventure. Literature. American. Historical. Historical Fiction |
Rating About Books White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War
Ratings: 3.78 From 696 Users | 87 ReviewsRate About Books White-Jacket: The World in a Man-of-War
I read this book after reading Erving Goffman's "Asylums". In that book, Goffman, a sociologist, discusses the rise of "Total Institutions", i.e. institutions that totally control the lives of those within. Melville's "White Jacket" is a book that Goffman often referred to in order to illustrate different aspects of life within the total institution.The introductory essay to this book discusses White Jacket in relationship to the growing bro-ha-ha over slavery, but I thought the book was muchMelville's "White-Jacket" and Independence DayI read "White-Jacket" for the Fourth of July in both 2012 and 2015. I am revisiting Melville and this book, a "paean on behalf of democracy" in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Melville's (August 1, 1819) birth.I wanted to celebrate the Fourth of July by reading a classic work of American literature and decided to reread Melville's "White-Jacket", alternatively titled "The World in a Man-of-War". The book was Melville's fifth novel, written
Semi-autobiographical rendition of life aboard a U.S. Navy warship. The narrator is curiously clad in a porous white jacket, and at one point mistaken for a ghost. Despite assuring his shipmates to the contrary, our candidate observer regards the myriad blooms aboard his craft with the same unmoored affect as one of Rilke's recently deceased. Examined are the everyday habits of the ships crew, the preterite, the elect, and those between. The author makes a strong argument against the naval
Imagine Moby Dick. Strip away the entire plot. Get rid of Ahab, Queequeg, Starbuck, and any other interesting character. Discard the philosophical flourishes and the incomprehensible contemplations about the nature of whiteness. Substitute one man-of-war for the Pequod, and go very heavy on the man-of-war analogues to MD's whaling chapters. Voila: White-Jacket.I admit, to many, this recipe probably sounds truly dreadful. And as a novel, it is dreadful. The more I read of him, the more convinced
Who knows that, when men-of-war shall be no more, White-Jacket may not be quoted to show to the people in the Millennium what a man-of-war was?It seems as though Melville was quite right in the above assumption as to the future use of his novel one hesitates to call it so - White-Jacket, for which he drew on his own navy experience and which he wrote down in less than ten weeks, regarding this book simply as a means of earning money. I just said I would hesitate to call White-Jacket a novel,
it is a signal tragedy that mardi failed where it deserved to outsell pretty much every book in english of its century (and some other languages) and that melville was reduced to scrabbling around with this and redburn. the structure of this, with its being entirely an encyclopedic collection of brief chapters do not allow for melville to go on the obsessive overwhelming tangents where he is at his best and of which his best work largely consists. we are all the more fortunate that he rejected
Brilliant satire of the pre-Civil War navy. Great social commentary on the juxtaposition of serving on a US ship and defending freedom while giving up US civil rights for the privilege. (Remember the UCMJ is very new.) And it's the book that--given the publisher made sure Congressmen all got copies--stopped flogging almost entirely on its own, which says quite a bit. I'm not a laugh-out-loud as I read person usually, but there is a lot of very wry humor and I laughed a LOT. I also read huge
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