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"Of course it was the stutter in Melville's handsome sailor, his 'lurking defect, ' that has been at the heart of my lifelong attraction to Herman Melville's late masterpiece, Billy Budd"-so begins Myron C. Tuman's new study of the strange, distant bond between a series of fathers (literary or otherwise) and their mostly inarticulate sons. At the center of this book is Tuman's sense that what at first looked like the relatively minor detail of Billy's stutter might provide a path into a new understanding of his own lifelong struggle with stuttering-that his own stutter, like Billy's, might be part of a larger narrative related to fathers and authority generally. This interest in stuttering and fatherhood soon led to two additional concerns: first, the need to make sense of the peculiar mandate that the story's surrogate father, Captain Vere, feels to oversee Billy's execution-that is, a filicidal impulse that Melville compares to
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