Herman Melville ~7 hr read

Deep in the mythic island-world of Mardi, the voyagers wander from realm to realm, through temples, philosophers, and allegory, in quest of the lost maiden Yillah.

This is Volume 2 of Herman Melville's 1849 'Mardi,' his strange, sprawling allegorical fantasy-romance of a South Seas dreamworld. Ambitious, philosophical, wildly imaginative. Read it for the visionary later Melville, a fantastical voyage through an invented archipelago of ideas.

In its time

Published in 1849, during the 1840s, mystery, mesmerism, and the proto-scientific tale in the age of poe and gautier.

Reading it

~7 hr read (a novel-length work, settle in).