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The Oxford handbook of Charles Brockden Brown
\"The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Brown's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Brown's fictional and non-fictional writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of literary theory, social justice, sexuality, and property relations, as well as slavery, Native Americans, and women's rights. His understanding of American and global history, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to emerging modernity\" -- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The historicism of Charles Brockden Brown : radical history and the early Republic
A new perspective on the cultural politics of Charles Brockden Brown
The novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the most accomplished literary figure in early America, redefined the gothic genre and helped shape some of America’s greatest writers, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, little has been said about the latter years of Brown’s career. While his early novels are celebrated for their innovative and experimental style, Brown’s later historical narratives are often dismissed as uninteresting, and Brown himself has been accused of having become “a stodgy conservative.”
Through a re-examination of these neglected historical writings, Mark L. Kamrath takes a fresh look at Brown’s later career and his role in the cultural politics of the early national period. This interdisciplinary study uses transatlantic historical contexts and recent narrative discourse to unveil Brown’s philosophic inquires into the filiopietistic tradition of historiography and increasingly imperialistic notion of American exceptionalism. It recovers a forgotten debate—and radical position—about the nature of historical truth and representation and opens up for contemporary discussion what it means to write about the past.
eBook
Sixth Senses and Vocal Glens: Autistic Nation-Building in Charles Brockden Brown’s Echolocational Fiction
This essay de-gothicizes Charles Brockden Brown’s sonic portrayals of cognitive disability. Led by “idiot” and “monster” Nick Handyside, Brown’s neurodivergent characters navigate an unlit American wilderness guided by echoes. This practice, later named “echolocation,” was discovered during the 1790s in scientific experiments that Brown and his circles chronicled as a quest for a “sixth sense.” In his fiction, Brown relates echolocators’ “sixth sense” to sensory-processing, communicational, and sociality traits today associated with autism. The result is not a horror show but a model of individual and national growth that prioritizes acoustics over semantics, relationality over persuasion, neuroplasticity over rationalism.
Journal Article
Conspiracy and romance : studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville
Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil War.
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Editors' Note
While we are on the subject of our editorial team members, we want to extend a hearty thank-you to our two Assistant Editors, Lauren Santoru (University of Alabama) and Maggie Warren (University of Tennessee). Focusing on natural histories, vernacular texts, and the 1828 novel Marly; or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica, this essay tracks how cane-rats and the consumption of such by enslaved people was a contested act through which inhabitants of the island thought about civility, survival, race, and the colonizing project. According to Myers, in the nineteenth century perceptions of rat consumption shifted yet again with the rise of the abolitionist movement. Proslavery writers discussed rat consumption by enslaved populations as necessary and life-sustaining; they sought to make the practice more culturally acceptable, with the ultimate aim of defending Jamaica's plantation society as civilized rather than uncivilized and inhumane.
Journal Article
'The Shock Which the Sound Produced': Bodies, Trauma, and the Audible World in Charles Brocken Brown's Wieland
Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), considered the first American novel, represents the emergent nation's social, political, and architectural landscape as fundamentally shaped by sound. Yet, while voice has garnered much critical attention in regards to American identity, the significance of sound more broadly has been overlooked. This article argues that Brown presents sound as an opportunistic infection that alters physiological function as it circulates between speakers and listeners. In fact, Wieland's soundscape embodies the very qualities scholars like Cathy Caruth associate with traumatic experience: it resists boundaries of place and time; defies linguistic expression; and subjects bodies to shocking, repetitive events that haunt them. Ultimately, I argue that Brown's representation of the audible world generates new understandings of how trauma moves between and within bodies.
Journal Article
Charles Brockden Brown Society Fourteenth Biennial Conference (review)
[...]of her separation from Constantinus, Pulchera is forced to take on the role of a male sailor, Valorous, to survive. According to Lawrimore, these accounts of the uprising are employed politically as justified violence to advocate for liberty and republican natural rights for enslaved peoples. Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan analyzed personal accounts of the Philadelphia Night Watch, a concerned citizen who carried a bell to alert the constable about criminal activity from 1800 which portray impoverished immigrant homeless vagrants not as deserving hard-working citizens but, rather, as innately depraved criminals prone to rob, commit murder, and steal. According to Erlandson, in this novel, Brown challenges systems of social and political control that were being reinforced by a Federalist impulse to diagnose the common people as disabled.
Journal Article
Yearning to 'Break Their Yoke in Ireland': Robert Emmet, Irish American Republicanism, and Charles Brockden Brown
Contrary to readings of Brown's early novels that understand him as viewing the Irish as \"savage\" or \"alien,\" this essay examines his depiction of the Irish over the course of his career in his political pamphlets, periodical publications, and editing against the Irish struggle for liberty and independence from England. It argues that court speeches like those of Robert Emmet in 1803 circulated in American print culture and inspired William Duane, Brown, and others to publish material that was sympathetic to the Irish cause. While Browns understanding of the British \"yoke\" of oppression may be seen as originating with his lived experience during the American Revolution, it evolves over time in his fiction, his political pamphlet An Address to the United States (1803), his Literary Magazine and American Register (1803-7), his American Register: A Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807-9), and his Address to Congress in 1809. The ability to search Browns larger corpus of writing electronically alongside databases like Readexs America's Historical Newspapers (1690-1922) invites similar study of other authors, such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge, whose writings contain depictions of the Irish or Ireland, and highlights the ways digital analysis of archival materials can map textual traces of sentiment or ideology into larger patterns of meaning.
Journal Article
Interfaith marriage goes wrong: Belle Kendrick Abbott’s Leah Mordecai
The literary preoccupation with interfaith marriages between Christians and Jews in nineteenth-century American literature reflects the social and cultural concerns that were at stake with regards to America’s place as a ‘Melting pot’, and the sensitive rapports between the dominant (Christian) culture and the Jewish minority. Most nineteenth-century novels dealing with intermarriage were written by Jewish-American writers. Looking at Leah Mordecai (1875), a quite distinctive novel, written by a Christian female writer, the Southern Belle Kendrick Abbott, this paper demonstrates in what manner an American gentile writer (who probably had scarce encounters with Jews, if at all) applies mostly antisemitic, but also common philosemitic stereotypical portrayals of contemporaneous Jews. This paper also probes the question of how religious affiliations and notions of religion and race reflect Christians’ and Jews’ attitude to mixed marriage. The results of this study demonstrate that, while the younger generation may in theory successfully overcome societal biases, American society as a whole, due to its conservatism, restrictive social norms and deeply rooted prejudices, is still unprepared to embrace prospective unions between religiously and/or racially differing individuals.
Journal Article