Ahab's Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard argues that Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is the best book ever written about nature, with scarcely a whiff of land. Richard J. King's book, Ahab's Rolling Sea, is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. It compares Ahab's and Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today, an expanse still immortal and sublime but also in crisis.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 448 pages
Publication date: 02 April 2021
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is widely regarded as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, it is often overlooked as a work of nature writing or even a novel of the sea. However, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard argues that Moby-Dick is the best book ever written about nature, with nearly the entire story set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact, Ishmael's sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did much more than live for a year in a cabin beside a pond. He set sail: to the far remote Pacific Ocean, spending more than three years at sea before writing his masterpiece in 1851.

A revelation for both Moby-Dick devotees and newcomers alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatrosses, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction. King then climbs to the crow's nest, setting Melville in the context of the American perception of the ocean in 1851—at the very start of the Industrial Revolution and just before the publication of On the Origin of Species. King compares Ahab's and Ishmael's worldviews to how we see the ocean today: an expanse still immortal and sublime, but also in crisis.

Despite the fact that the concept of stewardship of the sea would have been entirely foreign, if not absurd, to Melville, King argues that Melville's narrator Ishmael reveals his own tendencies toward what we would now call environmentalism. Featuring a coffer of illustrations and an array of interviews with experts in the field, Ahab's Rolling Sea offers a fresh perspective on one of America's greatest literary masterpieces.

Weight: 656g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226789873