318 pages
English language
Published 1961 by Dolphin Books.
Typee: a peep at Polynesian life
during a four months' residence in a valley of the Marquesas, with notices of the French occupation of Tahiti and the provisional cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet. A Dolphin master,
Herman Melville: Typee: a peep at Polynesian life (1961, Dolphin Books)
- OCLC Number:
- 244992
4 stars
(1 review)
At one time the most popular of Melville's works, Typee was known as a travelogue that idealized and romanticized a mysterious South Sea island for readers in the ruthless, industrial, "civilized" world of the nineteenth century.
But Melville's story of Tommo, the Yankee sailor who enters the flawed Pacific paradise of Nuku Hiva, is also a fast-moving adventure tale, an autobiographical account of the author's own Polynesian stay, an examination of the nature of good and evil, and a frank exploration of sensuality and exotic ritual. This edition of Typee, which reproduces the definitive text and the complete, never-before-published manuscript reading text, includes invaluable explanatory commentary by John Bryant.
Subjects
- Indigenous peoples -- Fiction.
- Sailors -- Fiction.
- Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia) -- Fiction.