Melville and Aesthetics

In an original and provocative series of readings that range across Melville's career, contributors consider not only the sources and implications of Melville's aesthetics, but the relationship between aesthetic criticism, historical analysis, and contemporary theory. The first of its kind, this collection returns us to the particularities of Melville's extraordinarily varied works and transforms the subject of aesthetics into an invigorating and unpredictable source of interpretive energy.

Samuel Otter is a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Melville's Anatomies and Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom and the co-editor, with Robert S. Levine, of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation. Geoffrey Sanborn is an Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College. He is the author of Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, andthe Maori and The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader.

Introduction: Aesthetics and Melville--Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn * Part I: The Matter of Style * Blubber: Melville’s Bad Writing--Alex Calder * Melville’s Ornamentation: On Irrelevant Beauty--Theo Davis * Melvillean Provocation and the Critical Art of Devotion--Andrew Dubois * Part II: Case Studies * Strange Sensations: Sex and Aesthetics in "The Counterpane"--Christopher Looby * Dead Bones and Honest Wonders: The Aesthetics of Natural Science in Moby-Dick--Jennifer J. Baker * Pulled by the Line: Speed and Photography in Moby-Dick--Laura Rigal * Pierre’s Nominal Conversions--Elizabeth Duquette * "The Silhouette of a Content": "Bartleby" and American Literary Specificity--Nancy Ruttenberg * The Revolutionary Aesthetics of Israel Potter--Robert S. Levine * Theatricality, Strangeness, and the Aesthetics of Plurality in The Confidence-Man--Jennifer Greiman * Battle Music: Melville and the Forms of War--Peter Coviello * Melville’s Song of Songs: Clarel as Aesthetic Pilgrimage--Ilana Pardes