The New Melville Studies Twenty-first Century Critical Revisions

What 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.

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.

Cody Marrs is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (2015) and the co-editor of Timelines of American Literature (forthcoming).