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 natur...

How the Civil War endures in American life through literature and culture.Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award's Montaigne MedalThe American Civil War lives on in our collective imagination like few other events. The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a...

American literature in the nineteenth century is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs argues that the war is a far more elastic boundary for literary history than has frequently been assumed. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took imaginative shape across, and even beyond, t...

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the f...

Between 1851 and 1877, the U.S. underwent a whirlwind of change. This volume offers a fresh account of this important era, assessing the many developments - both major and minor - that transformed American literature. In a wide range of chapters, scholars re-examine literary history before, during, and after the Civil War, revealing significant changes not only in how literature is written but also in how it is conceived, distributed, and consumed. Cutting across literary periods that are ...

A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature.It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"—such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It i...

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 consi...