Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things. By Cody Marrs. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 2023. xi, 176 pp. Cloth, $80.00.
Contributing to recent scholarship on the aesthetics of nineteenth-century American literature, this book considers the philosophical value of beauty in Herman Melville’s work, with special attention paid to Moby-Dick (1851), Timoleon (1891), and Weeds and Wildings. Marrs argues that Melville believed in beauty’s power to “dissolve and re-form individual identities” and establish or reveal intersubjective relations in the process. Marrs’s book includes a postscript that advocates for a “Pragmatist” methodology, a way of doing literary criticism that focuses on the effects, experiences, and feelings produced by a text, rather than the “cultural or sociological knowledge that it yields.”
Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933. By Isabelle Parkinson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. 2023. vii, 264 pp. Cloth,...
