Hoang Gia Phan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814738474
- eISBN:
- 9780814738931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814738474.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This concluding chapter discusses Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor which recounts the histories of slavery and servitude in the revolutionary reconstitution of citizenship. Throughout the novel, ...
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This concluding chapter discusses Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor which recounts the histories of slavery and servitude in the revolutionary reconstitution of citizenship. Throughout the novel, Melville shows the class of men whose story is “passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted.” As the inside narrative of “how it fared with the Handsome Sailor during the year of the Great Mutiny,” the novel is a story of these bondsmen; and of the revolutionary threat posed by them as a class.Less
This concluding chapter discusses Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor which recounts the histories of slavery and servitude in the revolutionary reconstitution of citizenship. Throughout the novel, Melville shows the class of men whose story is “passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted.” As the inside narrative of “how it fared with the Handsome Sailor during the year of the Great Mutiny,” the novel is a story of these bondsmen; and of the revolutionary threat posed by them as a class.
