The New Melville Studies
The New Melville Studies
$120.00
USDWhat does Melville studies look like after a phase of intense critical activity? This book addresses that question by analyzing Melville as a writer who was keenly interested in the pleasures, limits, and possibilities of various reading practices. It collects and assesses all of the major new trends in Melville studies. Essays, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, test out emerging critical methods. They explore Melville's centrality to American literary studies and consider the full range of Melville's career, connecting his poetry to his prose. This collection re-imagines Melville as a theorist as well as a writer, approaching his works as philosophical forms in their own right. It shows how scholars are changing Melville studies not only by re-orienting the texts upon which those studies are based, but also by incorporating new approaches that unsettle prior assumptions and interpretive claims.
- Showcases new methods and approaches in Melville studies
- Examines the full range of Melville's career, linking his poetry to his prose
- Presents Melville as a theorist in his own right, as a writer who was passionately interested in the pleasures, limits, and possibilities of various reading practices
Reviews & endorsements
'Much of his work remains an enigma, opening possibilities for further readings and further modes of criticism, against prevailing winds that took Melville to uncharted territory … Highly recommended.' R. T. Prus, Choice
‘No one interested in Melville’s writing will be disappointed with the quality and range of the close reading displayed in Cody Marrs’s The New Melville Studies.’ Graham Thompson, American Literary History
Product details
March 2019Adobe eBook Reader
9781108752893
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction: Melville studies, old and new Cody Marrs
- Part I. Feeling With Melville:
- 2. Paranoid reading, surface pleasures, and deadpan humor in the confidence-man Justine Murison
- 3. Melville and his flowers Gillian Kidd Osborne
- 4. Pip and the sounds of blackness in Moby-Dick Christopher Freeburg
- 5. Melville after secularism Brian Yothers
- 6. Marginal states: Melville in the Marquesas, 1842 Edward Sugden
- Part II. Thinking With Melville:
- 7. Perfectionist Pierre Dominic Mastroianni
- 8. The confidence-man between genres Elizabeth Duquette
- 9. Melville's style Samuel Otter
- 10. Melville and the conceits of theory Jennifer Greiman
- 11. Billy Budd: pessimism for post-critique Paul Hurh
- 12. Melville, Mardi, and materialism Michael Jonik
- 13. Popular networks in Melville's battle-pieces Eliza Richards
- 14. The biographical re-turn: writing Melville biography and the example of women John Bryant
- 15. Afterword: 'new', 'old', and 'with' Robert S. Levine.
