Here’s a History Channel special about the story that inspired Moby Dick. I’ve never read Moby Dick, but there were things discovered in a journal well after the book came out that are pretty wild.
Comment on Calling all Dickheads!
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
I’m about 200 pages in, it’s really good. But I wish there was a primer I could read about the themes, symbols, and historical context of the book. Just so I know what I’m looking out for. Searching for things on the Internet has gotten frustrating though. I did find the website that has notes about what all the words mean though.
bluemite@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
This sort of advice would be more useful 200 pages ago… but anyway it’s always good to search for an annotated edition. I read Norton critical edition,* it was really good, had diagrams showing what the different parts of the boat are called, a glossary, supplementary essays, and throughout the text all sorts of footnotes (some of them maybe too explicitly interpretative, but oh well). But I believe even the slightly more modest but still seriously prepared editions such as Oxford World Classics would do the job.
* a critical edition means the editors didn’t just reproduce an existing text, but worked off the most “original” materials available, such as the first edition or the author’s own manuscripts
Godric@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Cheers dickhead, online resources are key when youre reading those old nautical tales!
Statfish@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
There are also a few, more recent companion books that give a lot of historical context to both Melville and whaling, etc - Why Read Moby Dick? By Nathaniel Philbrick Ahab’s Rolling Sea, by Richard J King