MetaFilter posts tagged with Melville

Thar She Blows 2.0

Quietgal — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:29:33 -0800

The Online Annotated Power Moby-Dick explains the more obscure seafaring and whaling terms, 19th Century slang and topical jokes in Melville's epic. Hey, didja know there's a fart joke right there in Chapter 1? Created as something of a hobby project by Margaret Guroff, Features editor of AARP The Magazine and instructor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, the website holds forth hope to high school students across America and anyone else who wants to actually read this leviathan novel. Uh, as opposed to faking our way through it and writing a book report anyway. Psst, look for "head winds" and the Pythagorean maxim.

Caricatures from the late 19th Century and early 20th

Kattullus — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:15:34 -0800

900 caricatures of noted Victorian and Edwardian personages from British society magazine Vanity Fair which ran from 1868 to 1914. Among those pictured are Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Disraeli, Herman Melville, Alfred Dreyfus, Teddy Roosevelt, Gustave Eiffel and Charles Boycott (from whose name comes the word). A couple are mildly not safe for work, a few quite racist, as was the prevalent attitude of the time, and at least one is both.

There she blows!

marxchivist — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:05:12 -0800

Melville's Marginalia Online. The study of Herman Melville's creative process has long been hampered by a lack of primary sources. Melville's long lost annotations (they were written in pencil and subsequently erased) to the 1839 book The Natural History of the Sperm Whale have been restored through high-tech innovations such as squinting and digital photography. The results are available here in a PDF file. [more inside]