Pierre PDF Download

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Male authors
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Author: Brian Higgins
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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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.

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039326968X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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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.

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 568

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Author: Herman Melville
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780899849775
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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"Ambiguities indeed! One long brain-muddling, soulbewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck without beginning or end - a labyrinth without a clue - an Irish bog without so much as a Jack o' th'-lantern to guide the wanderer's footsteps - the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops". So judged the New York Herald when Pierre was first published in 1852, with most contemporary reviewers joining in the general condemnation: "a dead failure", "this crazy rigmarole", and "a literary mare's nest". Latter-day critics have recognized in the story of Melville's idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental-Gothic novel, and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques. As William Spengemann writes in his introduction to this edition, "For anyone who, being aware of the culture of modernity, is curious about its origins, Pierre ranks with Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ' Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and the poems of Emily Dickinson as one of the privileged places where the dead past can be seen giving way inexorably to the living present".

Author: James Creech
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226120225
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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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.

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 384960361X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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This is the extended and annotated edition including an extensive biographical annotation about the author and his life. When Israel Potter leaves his plough to fight in the American Revolution, he's immediately thrown into the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he receives multiple wounds. However, this does not deter him, and after hearing a rousing speech by General George Washington, he volunteers for further duty, this time at sea, where more ill fortune awaits him. Israel is captured by the British Navy and taken to England. Yet, he makes his escape, and this triggers a series of extraordinary events and meetings with remarkable people. Along the way, Israel encounters King George III, who takes a liking to the Yankee rebel and shelters him in Kew Gardens; Benjamin Franklin, who presses Israel into service as a spy; John Paul Jones, who invites Israel to join his crew aboard The Ranger; and Ethan Allen, whom Israel attempts to free from a British prison. (from wikipedia.com)

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781542920452
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel, the seventh book, by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The plot, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancee; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment with the novel and incidentally working some personal experiences into it.Coming after the lukewarm reaction to Moby-Dick, Pierre was a critical and financial disaster. Reviewers universally condemned both its morals and its style. Critics have more recently shown greater sympathy, seeing it as a "psychological novel -- a study of the moods, thought processes, and perceptions of his hero." Plot: Pierre Glendinning, junior, is the 19-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Pierre is engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, who controls the estate since the death of his father, Pierre, senior. When he encounters, however, the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, he hears from her the claim that she is his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Pierre reacts to the story (and to his magnetic attraction for Isabel) by devising a remarkable scheme to preserve his father's name, spare his mother's grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate. He announces to his mother that he is married; she promptly throws him out of the house. He and Isabel then depart for New York City, accompanied by a disgraced young woman, Delly Ulver. During their stagecoach journey, Pierre finds and reads a fragment of a treatise on "Chronometricals and Horologicals" on the differences between absolute and relative virtue by one Plotinus Plinlimmon. In the city, Pierre counts on the hospitality of his friend and cousin Glendinning Stanley, but is surprised when Glen refuses to recognize him. The trio (Pierre, Isabel, and Delly) find rooms in a former church converted to apartments, the Church of the Apostles, now populated by impecunious artists, writers, spiritualists, and philosophers, including the mysterious Plinlimmon. Pierre attempts to earn money by writing a book, encouraged by his juvenile successes as a writer. He learns that his mother has died and has left the Saddle Meadows estate to Glen Stanley, who is now engaged to marry Lucy Tartan. Suddenly, however, Lucy shows up at the Apostles, determined to share Pierre's life and lot, despite his apparent marriage to Isabel. Pierre and the three women live there together as best they can, while their scant money runs out. Pierre's writing does not go well - having been "Timonized" by his experiences, the darker truths he has come to recognize cannot be reconciled with the light and innocent literature the market seeks. Unable to write, he has a vision in a trance of an earth-bound stone giant Enceladus and his assault on the heavenly Mount of Titans. Beset by debts, by fears of the threats of Glen Stanley and Lucy's brother, by the rejection of his book by its contracted publishers, by fears of his own incestuous passion for Isabel, and finally by doubts of the truth of Isabel's story, Pierre guns down Glen Stanley at rush hour on Broadway, and is taken to jail in The Tombs. There Isabel and Lucy visit him, and Lucy dies of shock when Isabel addresses Pierre as her brother. Pierre then seizes upon the secret poison vial that Isabel carries and drinks it, and Isabel finishes the remainder, leaving three corpses as the novel ends.... Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period.

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

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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.

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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THERE are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner fromthe city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect ofthe green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems tohave ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.Such was the morning in June, when, issuing from the embowered and high-gabled old home ofhis fathers, Pierre, dewily refreshed and spiritualized by sleep, gayly entered the long, wide, elmarched street of the village, and half unconsciously bent his steps toward a cottage, which peepedinto view near the end of the vista.The verdant trance lay far and wide; and through it nothing came but the brindled kine, dreamilywandering to their pastures, followed, not driven, by ruddy-cheeked, white-footed boys.As touched and bewitched by the loveliness of this silence, Pierre neared the cottage, and lifted hiseyes, he swiftly paused, fixing his glance upon one upper, open casement there. Why now thisimpassioned, youthful pause? Why this enkindled cheek and eye? Upon the sill of the casement, asnow-white glossy pillow reposes, and a trailing shrub has softly rested a rich, crimson flower againstit.Well mayst thou seek that pillow, thou odoriferous flower, thought Pierre; not an hour ago, herown cheek must have rested there. "Lucy!""Pierre!"As heart rings to heart those voices rang, and for a moment, in the bright hush of the morning, the two stood silently but ardently eying each other, beholding mutual reflections of a boundlessadmiration and love."Nothing but Pierre," laughed the youth, at last; "thou hast forgotten to bid me good-morning.""That would be little. Good-mornings, good-evenings, good days, weeks, months, and years tothee, Pierre;-bright Pierre!-Pierre!"Truly, thought the youth, with a still gaze of inexpressible fondness; truly the skies do ope, andthis invoking angel looks down.-"I would return thee thy manifold good-mornings, Lucy, did notthat presume thou had'st lived through a night; and by Heaven, thou belong'st to the regions of aninfinite day!""Fie, now, Pierre; why should ye youths always swear when ye love!""Because in us love is profane, since it mortally reaches toward the heaven in ye!""There thou fly'st again, Pierre; thou art always circumventing me s