Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies An Aesthetics in All Things

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.

Cody Marrs, Professor of English, University of Georgia

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.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface: Beauty in a Time of Pain
Introduction
1. Ancient Beauty in Timoleon
2. Floral Beauty in Weeds and Wildings
3. Appalling Beauty in Moby-Dick
Postscript: A Note on Method
Notes