Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities

Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities PDF Author: Herman Melville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Book Description

Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities

Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities PDF Author: Herman Melville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 568

Get Book Here

Book Description


Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities PDF Author: Brian Higgins
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Herman Melville's Pierre; or. The Ambiguities has a storied place in the history of American publishing. Melville began writing this follow-up to Moby-Dick in October 1851, thinking that it might prove even more significant than its predecessor. The 1852 publication of Pierre was catastrophic, however. Melville lost his English publisher, and American reviewers derided the book and called the author mad. InReading Melville's "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," noted Melville authorities Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker probe the daunting story behind a deeply flawed but revealing work, one that directly reflects the major crisis of Melville's authorial life. Weighed down by huge debts, Melville took the manuscript of Pierre to his New York publisher, Harper and Brothers, desperately needing the new work to be a financial success. The Harpers balked at publishing such a dangerous psychological novel (incest was a theme) and offered him less than half the royalties they had paid for his previous books. The anguished Melville accepted the contract but subsequently added new passages to his manuscript -- passages that disparage the publishing industry and reflect his agony at the looming loss of his career. Higgins and Parker examine what can plausibly be reconstructed of Melville's original version of Pierreand explore the consequences of his belated decision to expand his work, showing in detail how his hastily written and awkwardly inserted additions marred much of what he had brilliantly achieved in the shorter version. They demonstrate that to understand Pierre, and Melville himself at this crisis, one must first understand the compositional history that resulted in the book as published. Setting Pierre in the context of Melville's literary life, Higgins and Parker's study is an illuminating demonstration of biographical and textual scholarship by two of the field's finest practitioners.

Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (Norton Critical Editions)

Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (Norton Critical Editions) PDF Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039326968X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
When Pierre was published one year after Moby-Dick, expectations were high. Readers expected—and Melville delivered—adventure, humor, and brilliance. Magnificent and strange, Pierre is a richly allusive novel mirroring both antebellum America and Melville’s own life. This Norton Critical Edition includes: · The Harper & Brothers 1852 first edition of the novel, accompanied by Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein’s editorial matter. · Six illustrations. · Contextual and source materials, including letters, responses to Pierre by Melville’s contemporaries, and works by Daniel Webster, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others, that give readers a sense of Pierre’s time and place. · Seven critical essays on Pierre’s major themes by Sacvan Bercovitch, James Creech, Samuel Otter, Wyn Kelley, Cindy Weinstein, Jeffory A. Clymer, and Dominic Mastroianni. · A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography.

The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville

The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville PDF Author: Robert S. Levine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521555715
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Specially commissioned essays provide a critical introduction to one of the most significant writers of nineteenth-century America.

Closet Writing/Gay Reading

Closet Writing/Gay Reading PDF Author: James Creech
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226120225
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
One of the most urgent tasks for gay studies today, James Creech argues, is the retrieval of a repressed, "closeted" literary heritage. But contradictions and problems cloud even the most basic theoretical questions: What does a lesbian or gay reading of a literary text require or presume? Can we talk about a homosexual writer expressing him- or herself before the invention of "homosexuality"? Was it possible for a writer like Herman Melville, for example, to create literary works linked to his own prohibited eros? In Closet Writing/Gay Reading, Creech shows how a literary critic can be receptive to implicit and closeted sexual content. Forcefully advocating a tactic of identification and projection in literary analysis, he lends renewed currency to the kind of "sentimental" response to literature that continental theory—particularly deconstruction—has sought to discredit. In the second half of his book, Creech sets out to analyze what he considers the exemplary novel of the nineteenth-century closet, Melville's Pierre, or: The Ambiguities. By approaching Pierre as the gay man Melville longed to have as its reader, Creech is able to decipher the novel's "encrypted erotics" and to reveal that Melville's apparent tale of incest is actually a homosexual novel in disguise. The closeted "address" to queer-sensitive readers that Pierre disseminates finally receives a critical reading that strives to be explicit, shareable, and public.

Hawthorne and Melville

Hawthorne and Melville PDF Author: Jana L. Argersinger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820327518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that “looms like a grand hooded phantom” over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne’s on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville’s on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville’s search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville’s times. Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture.

Critical Theory and the Novel

Critical Theory and the Novel PDF Author: David Bruce Suchoff
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299140847
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
A study of the historical origins of cultural criticism in the novel since the mid-19th century, using the critical theory of the Frankfurt School to declare the critical force of mass culture as crucial to the making of the modern novel. Discusses how mass audiences and politics presented problems to major novelists and how they responded in their writings and lives. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Critical Essays on Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Critical Essays on Herman Melville's Author: Robert E. Burkholder
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
A comprehensive collection of essays on one of the most important works of fiction in the 19th century, comprising both a gathering of early reviews, a broad selection of more modern scholarship, and three original essays--by Sterling Stuckey on the theme of cannibalism, Carolyn L. Karcher on the Amistad case, and H. Bruce Franklin on the historical backgrounds of Benito Cereno. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Melville

Melville PDF Author: Hershel Parker
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
"Revealed here is an unknown Melville, the autodidact who made himself a poet and who brilliantly constructed a personal aesthetic credo. Dispelling baseless claims that Melville had a quarrel with fiction after Moby-Dick (or Pierre) and that he did not, in 1860, complete a book he called Poems, Parker offers new evidence of the full trajectory of Melville's career in all its glory and frustration."--BOOK JACKET.

Melville

Melville PDF Author: Andrew Delbanco
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030783171X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.