Moby-Dick doesn’t deserve the ‘difficult’ label – this sea romance was once loved by office workers, sailors and children

By Edward Sugden, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, King's College London

I am currently writing a biography of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. The most important thing I have learnt is that Moby-Dick is not – as is often presumed – a difficult book. I claim this on the basis of those who read it, how they did so and what they took from it in the first decades of its life.

Moby-Dick has a fearsome reputation: dense, time-consuming, boring and bizarre. This reputation (although not absolutely unfair) was initially fabricated by a subset of “elite” Anglo-American academic readers in the 1920s to separate it from the very people who had previously sustained…

Read complete article

~	World Environment Day: In Jamaica, the battle against plastics continues

~	Pakistan: End cyclical harassment and persecution of minority Ahmadiyya community

~	Virgin Australia is coming back to the share market. Here’s what this new chapter could mean

~	Why the global tax system needs fixing – podcast

~	Grattan on Friday: Albanese will need some nuance in facing a female opposition leader

~	Tasmania could go to an election just 16 months after its last one. What’s going on?

~	Remembering Tulsa: Justice, Reparations, and the Fight for Healing

~	Israel’s destructive West Bank military operation fuels mass forced displacement of Palestinians

~	Harvard battle is Trump’s ‘Mao moment’: lessons from China’s state-sanctioned university crackdown

~	Thailand: Army Trainers Jailed for Conscript’s Death