Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

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. This book examines Herman Melville's engagements with beauty as both a concept and a shared experience. Throughout his prose and poetry, Melville reflects on the origins and effects of beauty, which he associates with natural forms and states of interdependence. Melville develops this perspective on beauty across his career, and it anchors the philosophy and aesthetics of books such as Moby-Dick, Timoleon, and Weeds and Wildings. In this book, Cody Marrs reconstructs how and why Melville cultivated this perspective on beauty, which emerged out of Melville's lifelong interest in painting, sculpture, science, and metaphysics. The book begins by reconsidering Melville's longstanding reception as a writer of the sublime and retracing the evolution of American literary studies as a field. The chapters examine three of the major modes through which Melville apprehends beauty, moving from ancient aesthetics to floral forms to psychological experiences of beauty. The book concludes with a reflection on the methods of literary studies and the viability of Pragmatism for thinking about aesthetics. Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies thus provides a revisionary account of Melville's career and a new interpretive framework for literary studies