Thursday, April 18, 2019

Billy Budd, 100 years on

The New York Times's David Belcher writes here on the occasion of the centenary of the discovery of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Excerpt:
Is “Billy Budd” the ultimate modern gay antihero who almost didn’t speak his name?

This year marks the centennial of the random discovery of Herman Melville’s novella by a scholar who was researching a biography of the author, and for a century “Billy Budd” has been analyzed and theorized as the ultimate battle of innocence, envy, voyeurism and latent homosexuality. Or is it just a tragic tale of a ship full of lonely and smelly men who secretly lust after the doomed and unobtainable pretty boy?

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