"It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this."

Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. Narrator Ishmael, along with the whaleship Pequod's other "meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways", is beguiled into joining Captain Ahab in his vengeful pursuit of the white whale that "dismasted" him. But along the way, Ishmael takes the reader along many a detour into variegated ways of knowing. In a tone "strangely compounded of fun and fury", Moby-Dick brings outlandish curiosity to bear on the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our diverse world.

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Features

• Edited by a leading Melville scholar, past president of the Herman Melville Society, and a participant in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed
• Introduction highlights a little-known annotation in Hawthorne's copy of Moby-Dick
• An edition for the twenty-first century, one that recognizes that each generation of readers will remake classic novels anew
• Introduces readers to the experience of reading the book, interpretative questions, and its place in the history of the American novel

New to this Edition

• Updated explanatory notes reflect the increased access to information that contemporary readers have
• New introduction focuses on the novel's elasticity and continued relevance for twenty-first-century readers, with attention to its queerness and its meditations on race, power, and disability

ABOUT THE SERIES

For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Introduction
Note on the text
Selected Bibliography
Herman Melvolle Chronology
MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE
Appendix: Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne
Explanatory Notes

Herman Melville

Edited by Hester Blum

Hester Blum is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008) and The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration (2019), as well as several edited volumes. Blum is past president of the Herman Melville Society, and her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed.