The Melville Effect

Traces of Herman Melville are everywhere. Works directly or loosely inspired by the nineteenth-century writer abound, from adaptations and artistic experiments to parodies and cheeky references. They are as distinct as Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Ahab’s Wife, Laurie Anderson’s mixed-media spectacle Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick, Maurice Sendak’s queer illustrations of Pierre, and the collaborative Emoji Dick. Melville turns up in opera, concrete poetry, auteur cinema, monumental murals, and sperm whale–sized sculptures. Why are so many artists drawn to Melville? What does his continuing presence say about contemporary culture?

Charting how a vast variety of writers, filmmakers, and artists channel Melville, Joseph Allen Boone offers new insights into the author, his works, and his many legacies. He argues that contemporary artists are drawn to Melville’s patchwork aesthetics, especially his mingling of genres and media and his prolific borrowings from popular and high culture. Boone’s cases range from artists drawing on the use of whalebone in nineteenth-century fashion to critique gender roles to those obsessed, like Melville, with size and monumentality in ever-proliferating artworks. Other contemporary artists find Melville’s environmental themes strikingly prescient, turning to his work to examine waste, extinction, and planetary crisis. Tracing a once nearly forgotten author’s improbable contemporaneity, The Melville Effect sheds light on how artists turn to literary pasts to make sense of the present and create art for the future.