Overview

When people think about Herman Melville, they often think about experiences of madness, horror, and the sublime. But throughout his life, Melville was deeply and persistently interested in beauty. In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagements with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career. In writings such as Moby-Dick, Timoleon, and Weeds and Wildings, Melville reflects on the nature, origins, and effects of beauty, and the ways in which beauty is inexorably bound up with considerations of religion, science, ecology, art, literature, and metaphysics. Melville's writing indicates that beauty is, ultimately, an experience of non-sovereignty, a felt recognition of the self's interdependence. In a series of fresh readings of Melville's works, ranging from the most to the least canonical, Marrs demonstrates how and why Melville developed this understanding of beauty, and the ways it resonates with recent scholarship on aesthetics, posthumanism, ecocriticism, materialism, and the means and methods of American literary studies. By recentring Melville's treatment of beauty and exploring its philosophical and scholarly implications, Marrs provides a new, evocative perspective on Melville as well as the broader field of American literary studies.

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9780192871725

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Reviews

In this uplifting, highly readable book, Cody Marrs cements his status as one of the very best critics of Melville's work. We travel in these pages through pragmatism, aesthetics, the decentering of humanity, and the history of American literary studies, and at the same time, by means of Marrs' rigorously sensitive readings, we sink deeper into the textures and rhythms of Melville's writing. I feel closer, at the end of this book, to where Melville was intuitively trying to go. * Geoffrey Sanborn, Amherst College * Cody Marrs enables us to see an aspect of Melville's writing that has always been before our eyes but has never before been regarded with such acuity: a sustained attention to beauty as a shared, transformative experience, defined in relation to suffering and violence, that connects perceivers to the wider world. Marrs amplifies our experience of Melville-and 'experience' is a key term for him, as he redirects attention not only to the significance of beauty in Melville's fiction, poetry, and journals but also to the experience of reading literature and literary criticism. * Samuel Otter, UC Berkeley *

In this uplifting, highly readable book, Cody Marrs cements his status as one of the very best critics of Melville's work. We travel in these pages through pragmatism, aesthetics, the decentering of humanity, and the history of American literary studies, and at the same time, by means of Marrs' rigorously sensitive readings, we sink deeper into the textures and rhythms of Melville's writing. I feel closer, at the end of this book, to where Melville was intuitively trying to go. * Geoffrey Sanborn, Amherst College * Cody Marrs enables us to see an aspect of Melville's writing that has always been before our eyes but has never before been regarded with such acuity: a sustained attention to beauty as a shared, transformative experience, defined in relation to suffering and violence, that connects perceivers to the wider world. Marrs amplifies our experience of Melville-and 'experience' is a key term for him, as he redirects attention not only to the significance of beauty in Melville's fiction, poetry, and journals but also to the experience of reading literature and literary criticism. * Samuel Otter, UC Berkeley * Poetically written, philosophically rich, and accessibly structured, this text was a refreshing reminder of the complex and beautiful nature of Melville's prose that drove Melville scholars towards him to begin with. * Coyote Shook, H-Environment * This book is a study that Melville scholars and general readers alike can savor, and that may have the effect of causing us to like, as well as admire, Melville more. * Brian Yothers, Modern Philology * Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies should be taken as a celebration of what literature does, rather than as a condemnation of historicism and contextualization. It provides fresh, doughty readings of not-so-familiar texts as well as an invigorating contribution to literary theoretical methodology discourse. * Damien B. Schlarb, American Studies. A Quarterly, Vol. 69:3 *

In this uplifting, highly readable book, Cody Marrs cements his status as one of the very best critics of Melville's work. We travel in these pages through pragmatism, aesthetics, the decentering of humanity, and the history of American literary studies, and at the same time, by means of Marrs' rigorously sensitive readings, we sink deeper into the textures and rhythms of Melville's writing. I feel closer, at the end of this book, to where Melville was intuitively trying to go. * Geoffrey Sanborn, Amherst College * Cody Marrs enables us to see an aspect of Melville's writing that has always been before our eyes but has never before been regarded with such acuity: a sustained attention to beauty as a shared, transformative experience, defined in relation to suffering and violence, that connects perceivers to the wider world. Marrs amplifies our experience of Melville-and 'experience' is a key term for him, as he redirects attention not only to the significance of beauty in Melville's fiction, poetry, and journals but also to the experience of reading literature and literary criticism. * Samuel Otter, UC Berkeley *

Author Information

Cody Marrs is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches and writes about American literature. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War and Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War; the editor of The New Melville Studies; the General Editor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition; and a co-editor of Timelines of American Literature. His work has also appeared in journals such as American Literature, J19, and American Literary History.

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