Review: The New Melville Studies, edited by Cody Marrs

The New Melville Studies, edited by Cody Marrs, brings together fascinating work by fifteen scholars, each of whom offers a unique lens into Melville’s writing. While the volume—as its title indicates—focuses exclusively on Melville, this does not prevent the contributions from moving into broader discussions of nineteenth-century history and philosophy, as well as engaging with recent methodological debates. These discussions will certainly be of interest to readers of Nineteenth-Century Literature. The contributions range from canonical topics to less-trodden ground and are divided into two sections: “Feeling with Melville” and “Thinking with Melville.” The boundary between the parts stays porous throughout the volume, with contributions engaging Melville’s works in affective and mental terms. Near the end of the volume, Eliza Richards’s “Popular Networks in Melville’s Battle-Pieces” observes that through Melville’s engagement with popular Civil War poetry, he “is trying to serve as a conduit to distill or temper...