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The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up “The Encantadas,” as well as three…

Benito Cereno

“Benito Cereno,” a story of atmospheric Gothic horror and striking political resonance, represents Herman Melville’s most profound and unsettling engagement with the horrors of New World slavery. Narrating the story of a slave revolt using materials drawn from Amasa Delano’s non-fictional account of the Tryal Rebellion from earlier in the nineteenth century, Melville’s story probes…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction

About the Anthology Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous…

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Concise Volume 1: Beginnings to Reconstruction

About the Anthology Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, The Broadview Anthology of American Literature balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with a thoroughgoing reassessment of the canon that emphasizes American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of…

On The Piazza Tales and Its Literary Contemporaries

[Brian Yothers, editor of our new edition of Melville’s Piazza Tales shares his thoughts on reading the stories in their literary contexts.] We often read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s most famous short story, as if it is detached from the literary history of its time. One of Melville’s earliest reviewers, however, noted important connections among…

Herman Melville’s “Scorching Irony”

[Brian Yothers, editor of our new edition of Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” shares his thoughts on the history of the story’s reception and its context.] In the blazing heart of one of the most famous speeches in the political and literary history of the United States, his 1852 oration “What to the Slave is the Fourth…