The Moral World of «Billy Budd»

The Moral World of sees the novel not as inviting us to choose between the testament of acceptance and the testament of resistance, those views that, respectively, support and critique Captain Vere but rather as challenging us to experience the difficulty of making decisions in the world. The first part is an examination of the two testaments, the second part analyzes the three major characters.

Russell Weaver received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago. His first book was (Peter Lang, 2006). He is currently Professor of English at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio.

«Russell Weaver’s ‘The Moral World of Billy Budd’ is an admirably thorough account of the interpretive history of what may be Melville’s most ambiguous tale. Professor Weaver carefully unravels the story’s literary, moral, and ethical web, while proposing a new reading that emphasizes the text’s determined resistance to simple or simplifying conclusions. Rarely has ‘Billy Budd’ received such persistent and quietly illuminating attention.» (Clark Davis, Professor of English, University of Denver; Author of Moby-Dick) «Russell Weaver’s ‘The Moral World of Billy Budd’ mounts an impressive inquiry into the moral and aesthetic complications that animate Herman Melville’s troubled, probing attempts over five years to write and revise his unfinished dramatization of Billy Budd’s near innocence, John Claggart'’s extreme depravity, and Captain Vere’s inconsistent responses to Billy’s impulsive wartime murder of Claggart. In persuasively arguing that the text’s dominant purpose is to resist moral closure, Weaver deftly enacts the sort of critical engagement that ‘Billy Budd’ seems designed to elicit – a multilayered, dialectical plunge into the narrative’s sea of morally oblique cross-purposes. Weaver’s rich and highly readable study analyzes key texts within the tradition of ‘Billy Budd’ criticism. Along with making careful use of evidence in the 1962 Hayford-Sealts Genetic Text of ‘Billy Budd’, Weaver’s engagement with the critical and textual history provides points of departure and reference for his ‘tour de force’ of close reading. At the center of this study resides his expansive and illuminating analysis of Vere’s character. Weaver argues that the text’s representation of multiple dichotomies frustrates rather than resolves questions regarding the collision between pragmatic and ideal imperatives. These competing possibilities fashion the artistic landscape wherein Melville stages his tragedy. Russell Weaver’s ‘The Moral World of Billy Budd’ offers a provocative study that successfully engages the critical and scholarly demands posed by the problem novel that Melville, even as he approached death during the summer of 1891, continually sought to complicate.» (John Wenke, Professor of English, Salisbury University; Author of )

Contents: The Critical Heritage – Acceptance, Resistance, and the Struggle To Define – Brodtkorb: Language, Mystery and the Acceptance of Annihilation – Scorza: Burke, Rousseau, and the Two Narratives of – Parker: The Genetic Text and the Incompleteness of – Garner: Finding the Kernel in the Shell – Wenke: and the Pursuit of Ambiguity – Billy – Claggart – Vere – The Moral World of .