Overview

Traces of Herman Melville are everywhere. Works directly or loosely inspired by the nineteenth-century writer abound, from adaptations and artistic experiments to parodies and cheeky references. They are as distinct as Sena Jeter Naslund's novel Ahab's Wife, Laurie Anderson's mixed-media spectacle Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick, Maurice Sendak's queer illustrations of Pierre, and the collaborative Emoji Dick. Melville turns up in opera, concrete poetry, auteur cinema, monumental murals, and sperm whale-sized sculptures. Why are so many artists drawn to Melville? What does his continuing presence say about contemporary culture? Charting how a vast variety of writers, filmmakers, and artists channel Melville, Joseph Allen Boone offers new insights into the author, his works, and his many legacies. He argues that contemporary artists are drawn to Melville's patchwork aesthetics, especially his mingling of genres and media and his prolific borrowings from popular and high culture. Boone's cases range from artists drawing on the use of whalebone in nineteenth-century fashion to critique gender roles to those obsessed, like Melville, with size and monumentality in ever-proliferating artworks. Other contemporary artists find Melville's environmental themes strikingly prescient, turning to his work to examine waste, extinction, and planetary crisis. Tracing a once nearly forgotten author's improbable contemporaneity, The Melville Effect sheds light on how artists turn to literary pasts to make sense of the present and create art for the future.

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Reviews

An impressive achievement and a masterly act of literary devotion, The Melville Effect charts and analyzes the remarkable recent acceleration in multimedia and mixed-media responses to Melville’s prose, especially Moby-Dick. Boone makes a major contribution both to Melville studies and to our understanding of artistic responses to literature as an integral aspect of literary history. -- Samuel Otter, author of <i>Melville's Anatomies</i> With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies – with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael – the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have re-envisioned Melville’s writing over the last half-century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville Revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions. -- Jennifer Greiman, author of <i>Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Aesthetic Form</i>

With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies—with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael—the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have reenvisioned Melville’s writing over the last half century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions. -- Jennifer Greiman, author of <i>Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Aesthetic Form</i> An impressive achievement and a masterly act of literary devotion, The Melville Effect charts and analyzes the remarkable recent acceleration in multimedia and mixed-media responses to Melville’s prose, especially Moby-Dick. Boone makes a major contribution both to Melville studies and to our understanding of artistic responses to literature as an integral aspect of literary history. -- Samuel Otter, author of <i>Melville's Anatomies</i> The Melville Effect expands and deepens our knowledge and experience of Melville’s pervasive presence in contemporary arts and culture. Boone provides a highly perceptive and remarkably inclusive survey and analysis of the unexpected ways in which creators in our multimedia age continue to draw inspiration from Melville’s flexible aesthetic and humanistic ethic in shaping their own imaginative responses to the challenges of life today. -- Robert K. Wallace, author of <i>Douglass & Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style</i>

With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies—with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael—the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have re-envisioned Melville’s writing over the last half-century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions. -- Jennifer Greiman, author of <i>Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Aesthetic Form</i> An impressive achievement and a masterly act of literary devotion, The Melville Effect charts and analyzes the remarkable recent acceleration in multimedia and mixed-media responses to Melville’s prose, especially Moby-Dick. Boone makes a major contribution both to Melville studies and to our understanding of artistic responses to literature as an integral aspect of literary history. -- Samuel Otter, author of <i>Melville's Anatomies</i> The Melville Effect expands and deepens our knowledge and experience of Melville’s pervasive presence in contemporary arts and culture. Boone provides a highly perceptive and remarkably inclusive survey and analysis of the unexpected ways in which creators in our multimedia age continue to draw inspiration from Melville’s flexible aesthetic and humanistic ethic in shaping their own imaginative responses to the challenges of life today. -- Robert K. Wallace, author of <i>Douglass & Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style</i>

With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies – with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael – the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have re-envisioned Melville’s writing over the last half-century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville Revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions. -- Jennifer Greiman, author of <i>Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Aesthetic Form</i> An impressive achievement and a masterly act of literary devotion, The Melville Effect charts and analyzes the remarkable recent acceleration in multimedia and mixed-media responses to Melville’s prose, especially Moby-Dick. Boone makes a major contribution both to Melville studies and to our understanding of artistic responses to literature as an integral aspect of literary history. -- Samuel Otter, author of <i>Melville's Anatomies</i> The Melville Effect expands and deepens our knowledge and experience of Melville’s pervasive presence in contemporary arts and culture. Boone provides a highly perceptive and remarkably inclusive survey and analysis of the unexpected ways in which creators in our multimedia age continue to draw inspiration from Melville’s flexible aesthetic and humanistic ethic in shaping their own imaginative responses to the challenges of life today. -- Robert K. Wallace, author of <i>Douglass & Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style</i>

Author Information

Joseph Allen Boone is professor emeritus of English at the University of Southern California. His recent books include The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia, 2014), the novel Furnace Creek (2022), and the story collection Conditions of Precarity (2024).

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