SHOW NOTES: Season 4, Ep. 6 - Dr. Dawn Coleman, Melville scholar

The stars definitely aligned for our production of the opera Billy Budd, because 2019 marks 200 years since Herman Melville, the author of the novel Billy Budd, Sailor was born. Back in May, Central City Opera hosted the Anchor Initiative, a series of events designed to deepen audience understanding and appreciation of the themes within Billy Budd and the novel's author, Herman Melville. One of the lectures featured Dr. Dawn Coleman, Associate Professor of English from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She has spent her career studying 19th-century American authors, including Herman Melville. Visit her website here. I interviewed Dr. Coleman in June over Skype and asked her to recap her lecture about Melville and Billy Budd.  Talking to an English professor means that we're going to hear about a lot of books - and Dr. Coleman did not disappoint. Here's a rundown of the books she mentioned during this episode which will keep your nightstand stacked for months: Raymond Weaver's biography, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, published in 1921:   More accurate, recent biography by Hershel Parker, published in 2005: Herman Melville: A Biography - Volume 1, 1819 – 1851 and Volume 2, 1851-1891     Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories. Collection published in 2016.    Definitive edition of Billy Budd, Billy Budd and Other Uncompleted Writings, just published in 2017 Dr. Coleman has written a book called Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel (2013) that examines the relationship between religion and fiction around 1850. You can buy her book by clicking here. Learning more from Dr. Coleman about the novel Billy Budd certainly deepened my understanding and appreciation of Melville's novel, Melville himself and Britten's adaptation of this story for the stage. I hope the same goes for you! -Emily Murdock, Host & Producer    

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