Typee (New Riverside Editions)

This is the first edition of Typee to place its most riveting features the highly charged and complicated accounts of sexuality, tattooing, cannibalism, and taboo in a broad historical context. Twelve rich selections from the writings of Melville's predecessors and contemporaries, along with eight illustrations, will help readers develop a fuller sense of where Melville's treatment of these topics is unconventional and why it matters. The volume also includes a complete list of the excisions and revisions insisted on by Melville's American publisher, further proof of how much his text was pushing the boundaries of acceptable literature of the day.