Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - John Carlos Rowe (essay date 1991)


Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, Herman Melville - John Carlos Rowe (essay date 1991)

John Carlos Rowe (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: “Romancing the Stone: Melville's Critique of Ideology in Pierre,” in Theorizing American Literature: Hegel, the Sign, and History, edited by Bainard Cowan and Joseph G. Kronick, Louisiana State University Press, 1991, pp. 195-232.

[In the following essay, Rowe discusses Pierre as Melville's critique of nineteenth-century literary production, suggesting that the novel is his farewell to writing as he conceived it before Pierre, and that it serves as a bridge to The Confidence-Man.]

The founders of Rome …—Romulus and Remus—are, according to the tradition, themselves freebooters—represented as from their earliest days thrust out from the Family, and as having grown up in a state of isolation from family affection. …

The immoral active severity of the Romans in this private side of character necessarily finds its...

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