Reading Billy Budd.

By Hershel Parker. Pp. vi + 190. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $12.95.

A definitive text for Melville's last great short story was established with the edition of Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Billy Budd, Sailor (1962). This scholarly edition which presented both a ~Reading Text' and a ~Genetic Text' (it is, oddly enough, known only as the ~Genetic Text' among Melville scholars) differs considerably from earlier versions of the story and is, to all intents and purposes, the most reliable edition on which to construct any critical account. One important fact established in it is that Billy Budd, Sailor was left unfinished at Melville's death in 1891, but, as Hershel Parker points out in his introductory chapter to Reading ~Billy Budd', critics continue ~to interpret the book …