Farewell to Faith: Melville's Pierre and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Secularization.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, debates over varied concepts of secularization have proliferated in many fields. Melville's Pierre offers a particularly striking literary example of how secularization was evolving in the mid-nineteenth century United States. The present essay demonstrates the multiple signs of the process of secularization appearing in Pierre in three principal domains: first, in the calamitous career of Pierre Glendinning as he enacts a modern imitation of Christ that subsumes a probing moral critique of contemporary Protestant Christianity; second, in an examination of the Church of the Apostles and Plotinus Plinlimmon as satirical representatives of sociological, philosophical, and theological models of contemporary secularization; and third, in a comparison of Pierre with James Anthony Froude's The Nemesis of Faith , a narrative depicting a similar crisis of religious belief that outraged the Victorian public three years before the publication of Melville's equally controversial novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]