This groundbreaking collection of essays represents Herman Melville as an artist for whom questions of sensation, pleasure, and form cannot be separated from philosophical and political concerns. Contributors offer original and provocative readings that span Melville's career and engage the resurgence of interest among literary scholars in aesthetics. The first of its kind, this collection returns us to the particularities of Melville's extraordinarily varied works and transforms the subject of aesthetics into an invigorating and unpredictable source of interpretive energy.

In an original and provocative series of readings that range across Melville's career, the contributors consider not only the sources and implications of Melville's aesthetics, but the relationship between aesthetic criticism, historical analysis, and contemporary theory.