Joseph Allen Boone is professor emeritus of English at the University of Southern California. His recent books include The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia, 2014), the novel Furnace Creek (2022), and the story collection Conditions of Precarity (2024).

With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies—with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael—the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have reenvisioned Melville’s writing over the last half century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions.

• Preface1. Sounding the Melville Effect: Methods and Theory2. Multimedia Melville, Messy Culture, Contemporary Remediations3. Whence the Novel?Measuring the Melville Effect in Post-Postmodernist Fiction4. Whalebone, Hoop Skirts, Corsets, Pants Roles: Women and Melville in Contemporary Art5. Size Matters6. Perverse Melville and the Sub-Sub’s Queer Investments7. Plastic Seas, Pasteboard Masks, Planetary FuturesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Joseph Allen Boone is professor emeritus of English at the University of Southern California. His recent books include The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia, 2014), the novel Furnace Creek (2022), and the story collection Conditions of Precarity (2024).

With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies—with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael—the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have reenvisioned Melville’s writing over the last half century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions.

• Preface1. Sounding the Melville Effect: Methods and Theory2. Multimedia Melville, Messy Culture, Contemporary Remediations3. Whence the Novel?Measuring the Melville Effect in Post-Postmodernist Fiction4. Whalebone, Hoop Skirts, Corsets, Pants Roles: Women and Melville in Contemporary Art5. Size Matters6. Perverse Melville and the Sub-Sub’s Queer Investments7. Plastic Seas, Pasteboard Masks, Planetary FuturesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

Joseph Allen Boone is professor emeritus of English at the University of Southern California. His recent books include The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia, 2014), the novel Furnace Creek (2022), and the story collection Conditions of Precarity (2024).

With The Melville Effect, Joseph Boone studies—with an encyclopedic impulse worthy of Ishmael—the work of artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers who have reenvisioned Melville’s writing over the last half century and more. But more than that, he reveals in his readings of literature, film, visual art, and performance an assemblage of aesthetic experimentation that propagates Melville’s inquiries into sexuality, gender, ecology, and art across time and form. We are, Boone shows, in the midst of a new Melville revival, and The Melville Effect is an essential guide to its myriad cultural expressions.

• Preface1. Sounding the Melville Effect: Methods and Theory2. Multimedia Melville, Messy Culture, Contemporary Remediations3. Whence the Novel?Measuring the Melville Effect in Post-Postmodernist Fiction4. Whalebone, Hoop Skirts, Corsets, Pants Roles: Women and Melville in Contemporary Art5. Size Matters6. Perverse Melville and the Sub-Sub’s Queer Investments7. Plastic Seas, Pasteboard Masks, Planetary FuturesAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex