Osobní nebo státní svědomí?! Melvillovo pozdní dílo Billy Budd aneb proces proti „švarnému námořníkovi“
Personal or State Conscience?! Melville’s Late Work Billy Budd or the Process against “Dashing Sailor”

Summary/Abstract: In this article the author deals with the Herman Melville’s fiction “Billy Budd” from the perspective of the current “law and literature”. So firstly he contextualizes this book in writer’s work whereas he also claims that it is a story that Melville wrote at the very end of his life. Further he makes us familiar with the legal problematics of the mutiny in the English law because exactly this plays a key role in the fiction. He pays his attention as well to the concrete naval mutinies in Spithead and Nore which passed exactly in the year 1797 in which Melville set his fiction. As his inspiratory source he mentiones as well the mutiny in American Navy on the USS Somers in the year 1842. In the further part of his study the author makes us firstly familiar with the plot of the fiction whereas he pays mainly his attention to the legal aspects of the process against the sailor Billy Budd which ends with the adjudgment death penalty. Finally he claims that the death of Billy Budd was not in accordance with the idea of the correct legal process and rather it was the sacrifice of Billy Budd in the interest of the preservation of the existing social order in the time of the war.

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