3 books by Charles Brockden Brown
Requirements: Epub reader, 3.26 Mb
Overview: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (1771-1810) was born to a merchant Quaker family in Philadelphia, and was educated at Robert Proud’s School. In his early twenties he committed himself to literature, and avidly read the latest models from England and Europe—especially Rousseau, Bage, Godwin, Southey, and Coleridge. By 1795 he was earnestly devoted to fiction; once engaged, he composed at breakneck pace, publishing between 1797 and 1802 seven romances, a long pro-feminist dialogue, and numerous sketches and tales. Four of those romances earned him the perhaps dubious title of the Father of the American Novel—Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800), and between those two parts, Edgar Huntly (1799). All four are remarkably sophisticated moral, psychological, and political allegories that burned into the artistic consciousness of Poe, Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, and Melville. By the 1820s, a decade after his death, he was ranked both in America and England with Washington Irving and Cooper as the embodiment of American literary genius, the first American writer successfully to bridge the gulf between entertainment and literature.
Genre: General Fiction, Classics, Gothic
Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, written in 1799, is the most ambitious work by America’s first important novelist. Not only a complex and challenging novel in its own right, it distinctively foreshadows the concern with depth psychology in later American fiction from Poe to Faulkner, as well as the scientific discoveries of Freud himself. Set in rural Pennsylvania, the story recounts the fate of young Edgar Huntly as he goes in search of the murderer of his fiancee’s brother. Once he believes he has discovered the killer sleepwalking at the scene of the crime, he pursues the man relentlessly, and then obsessively, until it becomes clear to Brown’s readers that Huntly is driven by motives buried deep within his subconscious. Though much of what occurs in Edgar Huntly may have escaped Brown’s own understanding and intentions, he was certainly conscious of having presented a particularly American version of the classic gothic novel.
Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
A terrifying account of the fallibility of the human mind and, by extension, of democracy itself, Wieland brilliantly reflects the psychological, social, and political concerns of the early American republic. In the fragmentary sequel, Memoirs, Brown explores Carwin’s bizarre history as a manipulated disciple of the charismatic utopian Ludloe.
Wieland; or, The Transformation
Theodore Wieland hears mysterious voices. Are these the result of delusions, ventriloquism, or divine forces? In this Gothic thriller, novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) portrays a man beset by religious guilt which erupts into mania, transforming him into the murderer of his wife and children. Once the mystery of the controlling voices is revealed, Theodore’s sister, Clara, undergoes her own transformation, as she moves from bitterness and despair over her brother’s destruction to resignation and, finally, peace. Brown’s fascination with the scientifically bizarre and the macabre influenced Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But he sought the solutions to his mysteries in nature and in the depths of the human mind, rather than in the realm of the supernatural.
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