Author : Herman Melville
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (332 download)
Book Synopsis Typee : a Peep at Polynesian Life : Complete with Original Illustrations by : Herman Melville
Download or read book Typee : a Peep at Polynesian Life : Complete with Original Illustrations written by Herman Melville and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is the first book by American writer Herman Melville, published first in London, then New York, in 1846. Considered a classic in travel and adventure literature, the narrative is partly based on the author's actual experiences on the island Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands in 1842, liberally supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and adaptation of material from other books. The title comes from the valley of Taipivai, once known as Taipi. Typee was Melville's most popular work during his lifetime; it made him notorious as the "man who lived among the cannibals".The book presents itself as a piece of travel adventure, but from the beginning there were questions whether the story was true. The London edition of the book appeared in the publisher John Murray's Colonial and Home Library series, accounts of foreigners in exotic places, and the slightly suspicious Murray required reassurance that Melville's experiences was first-hand, not the work of a professional travel writer, and that the author had himself experienced the adventures he described. American readers, however, accepted the story at face value.Typee is, "in fact, neither literal autobiography nor pure fiction," says scholar Leon Howard. Melville "drew his material from his experiences, from his imagination, and from a variety of travel books when the memory of his experiences were inadequate."[2] He departed from what actually happened in several ways, sometimes by extending factual incidents, sometimes by fabricating them, and sometimes by what one scholar calls "outright lies".The actual one-month stay on which Typee is based is presented as four months in the narrative; there is no lake on the actual island on which Melville might have canoed with the lovely Fayaway, and the ridge which Melville describes climbing after escaping the ship he may actually have seen in an engraving. He drew extensively on contemporary accounts by Pacific explorers to add to what might otherwise have been a straightforward story of escape, capture, and re-escape. Most American reviewers accepted the story as authentic, though it provoked disbelief among some British readers.Two years after the novel's publication, many of the events described therein were corroborated by Melville's fellow castaway, Richard Tobias "Toby" Greene.
