...The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides an up-to-date survey of the life of and full range of writings by Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and the early American republic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown...

...This chapter surveys Charles Brockden Brown’s early biography into five sections. The first provides background on eighteenth-century Quaker history and culture in Philadelphia, including the unlawful arrest and banishment of Elijah Brown, Charles’s father. The second section reviews Brown’s youth...

... Bartram William Cooper James Fenimore Pattee Fred Lewis Rowson Susanna Charles Brockden Brown Wieland firstness literary history pre-Revolutionary reception history Gothic world-system transatlantic editorial framing In his landmark 1926 introduction to the first modern edition...

...The novel Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 by Charles Brockden Brown challenges its readers with its multiple plot lines, a dizzying array of characters, and its formal complexity. It rewards them with the energetic effort of one writer to place in relation to one...

...This chapter on Charles Brockden Brown’s 1801 romance Clara Howard traces critical responses from the early nineteenth century to the present and argues that this long fiction marks a crucial transition in the author’s literary career. If Howard was long regarded...

...This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s Jane Talbot from the dominant reception of it as a failed novel and a capitulation to a gendered consumer market and political conservatism. Yet Jane Talbot deserves to be read not as expressing...

...This chapter traces Charles Brockden Brown’s theories of romance, history, and the novel, from his earliest fictional-historical essays, “The Rhapsodist” (1789), “Walstein’s School of History” (1799), and “The Difference between History and Romance” (1800); to Wieland...

...The Woldwinites, the group of British writers centered around Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, were a key influence on Charles Brockden Brown’s writing. From them, he drew a coherent set of political and artistic ideas concerning fiction writing. This chapter outlines the major aspects...

...Charles Brockden Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker upbringing was one of many influences on his work. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia Quakers went from a dominant to a persecuted minority. Quaker treatment of Native American and Scots-Irish neighbors was the source of internal...

...This chapter discusses Charles Brockden Brown’s literary investment in physiology, medicine, and disease as a crucial knowledge base for his Gothic fictions. The instances of somnambulism, spontaneous combustion, ventriloqual psychosis, and yellow fever that populate Brown’s fictions...

... role in the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, who used them to frame some of his novels and tales and to position his characters in moments of crisis. Moreover, this chapter connects the dilemma in the “Man at Home” series to the founding father and debtor Robert Morris, and through this connection...

...This chapter considers the various things that sex does and can mean in Charles Brockden Brown’s corpus, with particular attention to his novels. Following on Brown’s discussion in “Walstein’s History,” the chapter takes for granted that sex has at least three different meanings: sex as gender, sex...

...This chapter surveys the treatment of sentimentality and sensibility across Charles Brockden Brown’s fiction within the historical and cultural context of the wider Atlantic world. It considers the changing ways in which literary critics have responded to Brown’s use of sentiment, as well...

...Biography and reception of Charles Brockden Brown since the mid-twentieth century was marked by efforts to canonize him and to recover primary and related texts. The first generation of this era typically practiced formalist readings and focused primarily on Brown’s first four novels. Often...

..., Philadelphia embarked on the nation’s first urban public works project, a waterworks that connected its citizens to one another even as it raised new fears about these links. Charles Brockden Brown dramatizes these fears in Ormond; his surprising connections to the waterworks shed new light...

... the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in its analysis of four illuminating “episodes” of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. It examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise...

...This chapter presents a reading of three of Charles Brockden Brown's novels as parables of deformed sympathy. These are Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly. Brown Charles Brockden distaste for law Godwin William Gay reading Scrivening...

... of Charles Brockden Brown as he draws influences from other writers during the time while also developing an editorial function which he would work to define in his last fictions and in his periodical work of his final years. This chapter also explores the writings of a particular author whom Brown has read...

... of “Hitlerism,” sums up the theme of this investigation: the relationship between literary form and historical projects of annihilation. Baudelaire Charles Brockden Brown Charles Cooper James Fenimore Eliot T S Mallarmé Stéphane Messac Régis Poe Edgar Allan Valéry Paul Whitman Walt Balzac Honoré de...

...Charles Brockden Brown populates his gothic fiction with racially ambiguous characters to ask what constitutes national identity and who can be a citizen at a time when these concepts are shifting, unsettled and still contested. This chapter examines how Brown communicates liminal Whiteness through...