Bringing out the Beast in Melville's Billy Budd: The Dialogue of Darwinian and "Holy" Lexicons on Board the Bellipotent.(Herman Melville)

From: Studies in the Novel | Date: December 22, 2005| Author: Goldman, Eric | Copyright information

Since its posthumous publication in 1924 by Raymond Weaver, Melville's last novel has been read as a Manichean portrayal of the conflict between good and evil; an illustration of the dialectical materialism of Marxism; a testament to Melville's "acceptance" of fate or moral relativism; a modern allegory of the Crucifixion; a deconstructive "allegory of reading"; and a psychodrama about repressed homosexual desire. (1) Critics have also begun to investigate Billy Budd vis-a-vis the ...

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