/lit/ - Literature

so I want to read this but I'm daunted by how encyclopedic it is. Fortunately for me, I have a decent level of patience and a keen willingness to learn about various literary subjects. What books should read to understand the references and how they're relevant to the themes and plot of the novel? I've already read the Bible, most of the Greeks, Shakespeare, and Paradise Lost.

Are all great writers critical of their home countries?

Melville is critical of the United States. Joyce is critical of Ireland. Nietzsche is critical of Germany. It almost feels like if you're a great genius you can't help but hate your native land.

ENFP-A
Moby-Dick

So, what was Chapter 54 'The Town-Ho's Story' all about then?

Are there any actual criticisms of Moby Dick or is pretty much the closest any novel has ever come to being perfect?

>>15642863
A very obvious and boring answer, but fuckin Moby Dick really is just that fucking good. I don't see myself reading anything matching or surpassing it for a very long fucking time. For a close second tho you can have Epitaph of a Small Winner/The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (depending on wot translation you've got) by Machado de Assis.

What is your favorite cast of characters in literature, /lit/? Obviously we all have our favorite individual characters, but what is your favorite group of them? What is your best example of a cast of characters where the group is more than the sum of its parts, where the entire whole is greater than its individual members?

Pic related, the crew of the Pequod in Moby-Dick is a lot of fun.

>But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Started this today, just finished the first 100 pages, might read a bit more or might watch a film or summat, all I want to say is fucking hell lads, I knew this was meant to be good, but not this fucking good.

When did you realize that Lovecraft was probably directly inspired by Moby-Dick? Lovecraft was writing right around the time that Melville was being "rediscovered" by American academia and popular culture.

Go read the chapter "On the Whiteness of the Whale" and tell me it doesn't sound like something Lovecraft could have written.

>>13346606
Wordsworth often have typographical errors, the notes are not particularly thorough, nor are the introductions. Also, they are printed on unpleasant cheap paper. Pic related has clearly had more effort put into the cover, and this is reflected in the greater effort put into the contents within