Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

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 *