Article: Abolition, compromise and "the everlasting elusiveness of truth" in Melville's 'Pierre.' (Herman Melville)(Fictions of Reform)

Although readers of Moby-Dick have often seen reflections on the American political landscape within Herman Melville's masterpiece, they have resisted reading Melville's subsequent novel, Pierre, or The Ambiguities as a similar meditation on the sectional crisis of 1850. Written just one year after Moby-Dick in 1851, Pierre has been mined almost exclusively for its autobiographical content, its psychological infrastructure, and its perceived artistic failures.(1) Consequently, Pierre has seemed for twentieth-century readers to be an overwrought love story tangled within a novel about "literary achievement," a work that, as Henry Murray has argued, served for Melville as ...

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