Archive Alive: The Melville Lyceum Series 2008
6 P.M. • WHALING MUSEUM RESEARCH LIBRARY • FREE

The Melville Lyceum is a public forum focused on current scholarship about Herman Melville, his world and the influences of his writing. It is co-sponsored by the Museum and the Melville Society Cultural Project. The free lectures take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday evenings in the Whaling Museum Research Library.

These free public lectures focus on current scholarship about Herman Melville, his world and the influences of his writing. This joint project of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Melville Society Cultural Project is generously sponsored by Baker Books.

Melville enthusiasts, art aficionados, and science lovers from universities, high schools and the general public will learn about some fascinating new scholarship into one of the giants of American literature.

Lectures take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday evenings in the Research Library, and admission is free. For more information, call 508 997-0046, ext. 140.

Thursday, March 13
“The Books Behind Melville’s Books” with Mary K. Bercaw Edwards
Harrison Hayford, a scholar who donated a large part of the Melville Society Archive’s holdings, had a passion for collecting editions of the books Melville used as sources. Which version of Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Hawthorne’s stories or Shakespeare’s plays would Melville have read himself? Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, associate professor at the University of Connecticut and former student of Hayford, will discuss the authors Melville loved and wove into his own narratives, making them all the richer.

Thursday, April 10
“Rare Editions of Melville’s Books”
with Dennis Marnon
There is a certain thrill in seeing an old or beautifully bound book. The Tom Wendel Collection, part of the Archive, contains a splendid accumulation of first editions of Melville’s works, including rare British editions. Dennis Marnon, chief curator at the Houghton Rare Books Library at Harvard University, will speak about the collection and discuss the history of the publication of Melville’s books. You don’t have to be a collector to appreciate the exceptional qualities of these rare texts.

Thursday, May 8
“Seeing Into Melville: Illustrated Editions of
Melville’s Books”
with Elizabeth Schultz
The Archive includes a rich selection of beautiful, illustrated editions of many Melville works, including Moby-Dick, Typee, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and many others. Elizabeth Schultz – professor emerita at the University of Kansas and author of Unpainted to the Last, a study of art and illustration inspired by Moby-Dick – has demonstrated what a strongly visual imagination Melville had and how it has influenced a variety of popular and fine arts. The illustrations of Melville’s writings reveal a wide range of interpretations, occasionally distorting the texts’ meanings, but often providing challenging and illuminating understandings.