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Soldier, sailor, and spy, Israel Potter's lively career leads to encounters with historic figures such as Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and George III. "Hilarious, tender, expressive." — The Village Voice. Includes Melville's source material, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter.
Contains the complete text of the Herman Melville novel, "Israel Potter--His Fifty Years of Exile" and includes a detailed account of the composition, publication, and critical history of the book.
Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief, for his previous novel, Pierre, had shocked readers and brought down universal castigation. This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
srael Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile is the eighth book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in serial form in Putnam's Monthly magazine between July 1854 and March 1855, and in book form by G. P. Putnam & Co. in March 1855. A pirated edition was also published in London by George Routledge in May 1855. The book is loosely based on a pamphlet (108-page) autobiography that Melville acquired in the 1840s, Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (Providence, Rhode Island, 1824).Plot summaryWhen Israel Potter leaves his plow to fight in the American Revolution, he's immediately thrown into the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he receives multiple wounds. However, this does not deter him, and after hearing a rousing speech by General George Washington, he volunteers for further duty, this time at sea, where more ill fortune awaits him. Israel is captured by the British Navy and taken to England. Yet, he makes his escape, and this triggers a series of extraordinary events and meetings with remarkable people. Along the way, Israel encounters King George III, who takes a liking to the Yankee rebel and shelters him in Kew Gardens; Benjamin Franklin, who presses Israel into service as a spy; John Paul Jones, who invites Israel to join his crew aboard The Ranger; and Ethan Allen, whom Israel attempts to free from a British prison. Throughout these adventures, Israel Potter acquits himself bravely, but his patriotic valor does not bring him any closer to his dream of returning to America. After the war, Israel finds himself in London, where he descends into poverty. Finally, fifty years after he left his plough, he makes his way back to his beloved Berkshires. However, few things remain the same. Soon, Israel fades out of being, his name out of memory, and he dies on the same day the oldest oak on his native lands is blown down....Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851). His work was almost forgotten during his last 30 years.His writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. He developed a complex, baroque style; the vocabulary is rich and original, a strong sense of rhythm infuses the elaborate sentences, the imagery is often mystical or ironic, and the abundance of allusion extends to biblical scripture, myth, philosophy, literature, and the visual arts.Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a merchant in French dry goods and his wife. His formal education ended abruptly after his father died in 1832, as this left the family in financial straits. He briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839 as a sailor on a merchant ship. In 1840, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet for his first whaling voyage but jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. He returned to Boston in 1844 after further adventures...
Israel Potter (1744–1826) was a real person born in Cranston, Rhode Island. He fought at The Battle of Bunker Hill, during the American wars of Independence and later was a sailor in the Revolutionary navy. He was captured by the British, imprisoned and escaped. He became a secret agent in France On finally returning penniless to the beloved homeland he campaigned to be given a pension for his service to America.
Melville's eighth book was begun as a simple rewrite of an obscure little narrative entitled Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, in which Israel tells the story of his sad fall from Revolutionary hero to London peddler. Following its opening chapter Melville's novel retells that tale, with close adherence to the language and events of the Life, and then, shaking free of the original narrative, alternately moves between invented episodes and historical sources unrelated to the Life. Israel Potter is unique among Melville's books. It is the only one to be offered in the guise of literal biography, the tale presuming to offer an accurate life history of the man Israel Potter who did in fact fight at Bunker Hill. It is also Melville's only historical novel: it presents famous men of the American Revolution - Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, Ethan Allen, and others - in situations that are a matter of historical record.
In imagining history, one must inevitably rely on its textual representations, whether fictitious or supposedly “objective”, yet always subject to the constraints and conventions of textuality. Still, it is precisely by exploiting and consciously relying on the textual in the presentation of the past that contemporary authors, including politicians and makers of history, strive to provide it with current significance, emotional impact and universal meaning. The study of such attempts benefits from a variety of perspectives, encompassing not only classical, but also popular texts and media. An interdisciplinary collection of papers devoted to the issues of retelling, rewriting, and representation of the past in fiction and various text-types, this volume juxtaposes modern and post-modern understanding of collective versus personal history. The contributors are scholars specializing in literary studies (e.g. postcolonialism and popular fiction), linguistics (e.g. critical discourse analysis) and cultural studies (e.g. media studies), bringing a wide spectrum of theoretical insights into the field. The collection opens with papers on the general changes in viewing history that have occurred since the 19th century. Further papers discuss postcolonial, feminist and gender-related perspectives on history reflected in postmodern fiction, revealing the power struggle around the depiction of the past. The next part of the volume is devoted to the presentation of historical breakthroughs in political and media discourse. Finally, the collection draws attention to some unorthodox visions of history involving alternative worlds and fantastic elements encountered in the genre of speculative fiction.
Nineteenth-century American authors, critics, and readers believed that biography had the power to shape individuals' characters and to help define the nation's identity. In an age predating radio and television, biography was not simply a genre of writing, says Scott Casper; it was the medium that allowed people to learn about public figures and peer into the lives of strangers. In this pioneering study, Casper examines how Americans wrote, published, and read biographies and how their conceptions of the genre changed over the course of a century. Campaign biographies, memoirs of pious women, patriotic narratives of eminent statesmen, "mug books" that collected the lives of ordinary midwestern farmers--all were labeled "biography," however disparate their contents and the contexts of their creation, publication, and dissemination. Analyzing debates over how these diverse biographies should be written and read, Casper reveals larger disputes over the meaning of character, the definition of American history, and the place of American literary practices in a transatlantic world of letters. As much a personal experience as a literary genre, biography helped Americans imagine their own lives as well as the ones about which they wrote and read.
In this study of American cultural production from the colonial era to the present, Russell Reising takes up the loose ends of popular American narratives to craft a new theory of narrative closure. In the range of works examined here - from Phillis Wheatley's poetry to Herman Melville's Israel Potter, from Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" to Disney's Dumbo - Reising finds endings that violate all existing theories of closure, and narratives that expose the often unarticulated issues that inspired these texts. Reising suggests that these "nonendings" entirely refocus the narrative structures they appear to conclude, accentuate the narrative stresses and ideological fissures that the texts seem to suppress, and reveal "shadow narratives" that trail alongside the dominant story line. He argues that unless the reader notices the ruptures in the closing moments of these works, the social and historical moments in which the narrative and the reader are embedded will be missed. This reading not only offers new interpretive possibilities, but also uncovers startling affinities between the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the fiction of Henry James, between Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Melville's Israel Potter, and between Emily Dickinson's poem "I Started Early - Took My Dog " and Disney's animated classic. Pursuing the implications of these failed moments of closure, Reising elaborates on topics ranging from the roots of domestic violence and mass murder in early American religious texts to the pornographic imperative of mid-century nature writing, and from James's "descent" into naturalist and feminist fiction to Dumbo's explosive projection of commercial, racial, and political agendas for postwar U.S. culture. General readers interested in American literature as well as students of literary theory will find Loose Ends enlightening and provocative.