Of Billy’s Time

Temporality in Melville’s Billy Budd

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8895925
AutoresChristopher Looby (autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume45
Fascículo1
Páginas23-37
Data de publicação2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCanadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X
EditoraUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3138/cras.2015.s02
OpenAlexW2092109984
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas14

Billy Budd is replete with invocations of various temporalities. This article brings the tale’s “juggling temporalities” to bear upon the questions of sexuality that the story also addresses and shows that Billy Budd is a searching exploration of (and meditation on) the profound historicity of sexuality. Unfinished and unpublished at the time of Melville’s death, the extant manuscript of Billy Budd is a complicated palimpsest of additions and revisions. Reconstructing the genealogy of the manuscript’s development reveals that Melville moved the action back in time; made Billy younger; added, at different stages of composition, the characters of Claggart (the “homosexual in the text,” according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known reading) and Captain Vere. But there are several homosexuals in the text, who, although they ostensibly co-exist in one time and place, nevertheless belong to different historical regimes of sexuality

Art · Epistemology · Historicity (philosophy · Human sexuality · Literature · Palimpsest · Sociology · Temporalities · Temporality · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Leadership, Human Resources, Global Affairs · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment