Everything about Redburn totally explained
Redburn: His First Voyage is a novel by
Herman Melville published on
September 29,
1849, by
Richard Bentley in
London and on
November 14,
1849, by
Harper & Brothers in
New York City. The author returned to the tone of his first novels,
Typee (1846) and
Omoo (1847).
Redburn is a semi-autobiographical novel concerning the sufferings of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of
Liverpool. This theme of a youth confronted by realities and evils for which he's unprepared—or incorrectly prepared by both family and American institutions—is a prominent one in Melville's works.
While not generally considered as profound as Melville's later works, the most notable being
Moby-Dick, the novel can be viewed as a precursor to later, more complex works of fiction. For example, many of
Redburn's themes are echoed in
Moby-Dick, and some of
Redburn's characters are forerunners of those in Melville's most epic novel (for example, Jackson is a precursor of Captain Ahab).
With
Redburn, Melville was hastily trying to return to a more commercial format after having taken a critical and commercial drubbing with his allegorical novel
Mardi, which had been published earlier in the year. Melville leaves behind the complex structures in
Mardi, a book that never quite gelled, for a more straightforward and travelogue-like narrative in the traditions of his earliest work. The novel does, however, display some of the more experimental tendencies that made
Moby-Dick so popular after Melville's death, and begins to incorporate much of the symbolism that separates his earlier work from later, denser novels such as
. Melville also takes the opportunity in
Redburn to make a number of social criticisms, perhaps most prominent among them both explicit and implicit attacks on the evils of drink.
Oddly enough,
Redburn also contains one of the notable examples of
spontaneous combustion in literature, along with
Dickens'
Bleak House.Further Information
Get more info on 'Redburn'.
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