Cody Marrs opens Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies with a pointed answer to the predictable questions raised by the study of beauty under the conditions of the present: how to speak of beauty during a time of pandemic, war, climate change, and pervasive inequality? Rather than an inappropriate evasion of suffering or an alienating aestheticization of violence, Marrs argues, beauty—as Herman Melville revealed and engaged it in his work—instead offers a means of confronting suffering, violence, and injustice. Across Melville's prose and poetry, beauty is woven together with pain and violence, never as negation or compensation, but as a corollary and counterbalance. From the terrible beauty of the white whale to the crush of the handsome sailor's fist, Melville reveals how specific forms of beauty are bound to terror and pain because all these experiences are outgrowths of life itself. What Melville finds in beauty is the fundamental experience...

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