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. Typee offers an alternative for instructors wishing to teach briefer Melville fiction.