商品簡介
Melville published in Putnam's Magazine for several years before he gathered up his essays to be printed in a single volume. However, he included a linking piece by a narrator, a sort of tie that wove its way around the other pieces. It was centered in piazzas (hence the title The Piazza Tales and it included the reticent scrivener Bartleby, a character who was very odd even for Melville. Arsic explores that creation within what was going on in Melville's world, examining issues and themes such as identity, passivity, marriage and sexuality, the impersonal and neutral, drug addiction, and ethics. Whether the piazza or piazzas are cradles or madhouses is part of the fun in this, and Arsic makes Melville's fascination with insanity and incarceration for insanity very interesting. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
作者簡介
Branka Arsic is Associate Professor of English at SUNY, Albany. She is the author of The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (Stanford, 2000).
