Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Gillian Brown (essay date 1990)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - Gillian Brown (essay date 1990)

Gillian Brown (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Anti-Sentimentalism and Authorship in Pierre,” in Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 135-69.

[In the following essay, Brown interprets Pierre as Melville's parody and critique of the typical sentimental domestic novel of his day, focusing on the author's handling of the role of the individual in American society.]

Seventeen books into the narrative of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Melville abandons the chronology of Pierre's family history—the stuff of the sentimental novel—to announce: “I write precisely as I please.”1 This declaration of literary individualism heralds a satirical discussion of “Young America in Literature,” as typified by “the juvenile author” of “that delightful love-sonnet, entitled ‘The Tropical Summer’” (245). We now learn that Pierre has...

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