Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - James C. Wilson (essay date 1987)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - James C. Wilson (essay date 1987)

James C. Wilson (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: “The Sentimental Education of Pierre Glendinning: An Exploration of the Causes and Implications of Violence in Melville's Pierre,” in American Transcendental Quarterly: A Journal of New England Writers, Vol. 1, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 167-77.

[In the following essay, Wilson notes that Melville attributes Pierre's psychological problems, especially his belief in his own capacity for heroic action, to his sentimental education.]

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville's seventh and most problematic novel, is still so little understood that critics have tended to focus on questions of authorial intent and/or composition: whether Melville intended to write a popular romance, a satire of a popular romance, or even a psychological novel;1 and whether (and if so, why) Melville deviated from his original plot when he added the autobiographical material in the second...

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