Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832967
- eISBN:
- 9781469600390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9780807832967.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter turns to two early republican novels to explore the ways they presented the intermix of sameness and difference, class, race, and gender during the opening days of the new Republic, when ...
More
This chapter turns to two early republican novels to explore the ways they presented the intermix of sameness and difference, class, race, and gender during the opening days of the new Republic, when radical economic and political change intersected. These are Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Leonora Sansay's Zelica, the Creole.Less
This chapter turns to two early republican novels to explore the ways they presented the intermix of sameness and difference, class, race, and gender during the opening days of the new Republic, when radical economic and political change intersected. These are Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Leonora Sansay's Zelica, the Creole.
Robert S. Levine
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832264
- eISBN:
- 9781469605654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807887882_levine.5
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter considers Brown in relation to the “affairs of Louisiana,” and points to the limits of traditional formulations of U.S. nationalism, and literary nationalism, when viewed exclusively in ...
More
This chapter considers Brown in relation to the “affairs of Louisiana,” and points to the limits of traditional formulations of U.S. nationalism, and literary nationalism, when viewed exclusively in terms of the United States versus Great Britain. Imperial conflict by the Mississippi and in the Caribbean, the ongoing slave trade, and the close connections among the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution were crucial to U.S. nationalism, literary nationalism, and the debates on Louisiana. There was no single nationalism or literary nationalism that encompassed all such developments. What we can say is that American literary nationalism during this period had a range of perspectives and numerous advocates and practitioners, and that the debates on the Louisiana Purchase brought a renewed attention to the dynamics of race as a constituent of nation.Less
This chapter considers Brown in relation to the “affairs of Louisiana,” and points to the limits of traditional formulations of U.S. nationalism, and literary nationalism, when viewed exclusively in terms of the United States versus Great Britain. Imperial conflict by the Mississippi and in the Caribbean, the ongoing slave trade, and the close connections among the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution were crucial to U.S. nationalism, literary nationalism, and the debates on Louisiana. There was no single nationalism or literary nationalism that encompassed all such developments. What we can say is that American literary nationalism during this period had a range of perspectives and numerous advocates and practitioners, and that the debates on the Louisiana Purchase brought a renewed attention to the dynamics of race as a constituent of nation.
Pamela Clemit
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112204
- eISBN:
- 9780191670701
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112204.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The development of Godwinian methods in pursuit of a critique of William Godwin is Charles Brockden Brown's distinctive achievement in Wieland; or, The Transformation, his first completed novel, ...
More
The development of Godwinian methods in pursuit of a critique of William Godwin is Charles Brockden Brown's distinctive achievement in Wieland; or, The Transformation, his first completed novel, published September 1798. Brown's use of subjective narrative techniques to convey conservative political fears makes Wieland a pivotal text between Godwin's essentially optimistic critique of society in Caleb Williams and Mary Shelley's uncompromising pessimism in Frankenstein. Though much of the novel's immediate appeal lay in its qualities as a terror novel, Brown himself put great emphasis on its moral utility. Before looking at these imaginative strategies in more detail, there is a need to account for Brown's rapid shift from enthusiastic welcome of Godwin's fiction to distrust of revolutionary aspirations. Brown's mixed allegiance to Godwin should be seen in the light of American conservative reaction against revolutionary ideas.Less
The development of Godwinian methods in pursuit of a critique of William Godwin is Charles Brockden Brown's distinctive achievement in Wieland; or, The Transformation, his first completed novel, published September 1798. Brown's use of subjective narrative techniques to convey conservative political fears makes Wieland a pivotal text between Godwin's essentially optimistic critique of society in Caleb Williams and Mary Shelley's uncompromising pessimism in Frankenstein. Though much of the novel's immediate appeal lay in its qualities as a terror novel, Brown himself put great emphasis on its moral utility. Before looking at these imaginative strategies in more detail, there is a need to account for Brown's rapid shift from enthusiastic welcome of Godwin's fiction to distrust of revolutionary aspirations. Brown's mixed allegiance to Godwin should be seen in the light of American conservative reaction against revolutionary ideas.
Robert S. Levine
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832264
- eISBN:
- 9781469605654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807887882_levine
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and ...
More
American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. This book challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes 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; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. The book offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.Less
American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. This book challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multiracial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, it argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period. The book emphasizes 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; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and Frederick Douglass and his approximately forty-year interest in Haiti. The book offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.
Caleb Crain
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300083323
- eISBN:
- 9780300133677
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300083323.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
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.
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.
Caleb Crain
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300083323
- eISBN:
- 9780300133677
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300083323.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels ...
More
This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. The book traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature—a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout, this book demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.Less
This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. The book traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature—a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout, this book demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.
Katy L. Chiles
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199313501
- eISBN:
- 9780199350728
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199313501.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden ...
More
Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly take up the natural-historical idea that race was a condition one managed to sustain rather than an immutable bodily fact. These texts explore racial transformation by featuring the protagonists’ journey among American Indian tribes. Understanding how Letters examines whites altering racially in the New World provides a new understanding of what Crèvecoeur’s “American” is. Marrant’s Narrative offers up a picture of an African American “becoming” Native American. Brown’s Edgar Huntly explores what might happen to creole whites by depicting the strange transformation Edgar undergoes. In these texts, the concept of racial transformation—rather than one of passing—underpins these literary depictions of how one’s race begins to change into that of another.Less
Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly take up the natural-historical idea that race was a condition one managed to sustain rather than an immutable bodily fact. These texts explore racial transformation by featuring the protagonists’ journey among American Indian tribes. Understanding how Letters examines whites altering racially in the New World provides a new understanding of what Crèvecoeur’s “American” is. Marrant’s Narrative offers up a picture of an African American “becoming” Native American. Brown’s Edgar Huntly explores what might happen to creole whites by depicting the strange transformation Edgar undergoes. In these texts, the concept of racial transformation—rather than one of passing—underpins these literary depictions of how one’s race begins to change into that of another.
Pamela Clemit
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112204
- eISBN:
- 9780191670701
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112204.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Shelley. In the first ...
More
This book is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Shelley. In the first study of these authors as a historically specific group, the book argues for a greater unity between Godwin's fictional techniques and his radical political philosophy than has been perceived. Its analysis of the works of Brown and Mary Shelley, moreover, reveals how these writers modified, reshaped, and redefined Godwin's distinctive themes and techniques in response to shifting ideological pressures in the post-revolutionary period. Examining prose fiction in a period traditionally seen as dominated by poetry, the book stresses the necessity for a revised view of British Romanticism. Uncovering the links between Godwin's fictional analysis of subjective experience and his progressive political philosophy, this book paves the way for a reappraisal of the apparently quietist and introspective concerns of other writers of the period.Less
This book is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Shelley. In the first study of these authors as a historically specific group, the book argues for a greater unity between Godwin's fictional techniques and his radical political philosophy than has been perceived. Its analysis of the works of Brown and Mary Shelley, moreover, reveals how these writers modified, reshaped, and redefined Godwin's distinctive themes and techniques in response to shifting ideological pressures in the post-revolutionary period. Examining prose fiction in a period traditionally seen as dominated by poetry, the book stresses the necessity for a revised view of British Romanticism. Uncovering the links between Godwin's fictional analysis of subjective experience and his progressive political philosophy, this book paves the way for a reappraisal of the apparently quietist and introspective concerns of other writers of the period.
Steven Connor
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184331
- eISBN:
- 9780191674204
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184331.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the ...
More
It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the topic within one of the earliest novels of the new American republic. It is also important to remember that this was the period in which ventriloquism was beginning to find its place within what would become a culture of mass entertainment. It was to be expected that the growing tendency for ventriloquism to take a narrative form would result in its appearance in more developed narratives. However, it was scarcely to be expected that a young American writer, determined to assist in the formation of a distinctively American form of novel in the early days of the new republic, would make ventriloquism the centrepiece of his work. However, this is precisely what Charles Brockden Brown did in Wieland, Or The Transformation: An American Tale.Less
It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the topic within one of the earliest novels of the new American republic. It is also important to remember that this was the period in which ventriloquism was beginning to find its place within what would become a culture of mass entertainment. It was to be expected that the growing tendency for ventriloquism to take a narrative form would result in its appearance in more developed narratives. However, it was scarcely to be expected that a young American writer, determined to assist in the formation of a distinctively American form of novel in the early days of the new republic, would make ventriloquism the centrepiece of his work. However, this is precisely what Charles Brockden Brown did in Wieland, Or The Transformation: An American Tale.
Chad Luck
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263004
- eISBN:
- 9780823266340
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263004.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The ...
More
This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The chapter argues that in the novel’s famous cave sequence, Brown ingeniously narrativizes Condillac’s dictum that “touch teaches vision” and in so doing enacts a subterranean model of spatial orientation that directly evokes the “plenum versus vacuum” debates of Locke and Hume. The novel then links this spatio-sensory exploration to an array of eighteenth-century property laws that focus on the creation of boundary lines. It becomes clear that Brown’s fictional account of settler-Indian violence on the Pennsylvania frontier is designed to imaginatively re-walk the infamous “Walking Purchase” treaty of 1737 in which the Delaware tribe was defrauded of 750,000 acres. In doing so, the novel calls attention to the Native American bodies conveniently erased from the legal and historical record.Less
This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The chapter argues that in the novel’s famous cave sequence, Brown ingeniously narrativizes Condillac’s dictum that “touch teaches vision” and in so doing enacts a subterranean model of spatial orientation that directly evokes the “plenum versus vacuum” debates of Locke and Hume. The novel then links this spatio-sensory exploration to an array of eighteenth-century property laws that focus on the creation of boundary lines. It becomes clear that Brown’s fictional account of settler-Indian violence on the Pennsylvania frontier is designed to imaginatively re-walk the infamous “Walking Purchase” treaty of 1737 in which the Delaware tribe was defrauded of 750,000 acres. In doing so, the novel calls attention to the Native American bodies conveniently erased from the legal and historical record.
James D. Lilley
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823255153
- eISBN:
- 9780823261062
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823255153.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In chapter 3, I focus on Charles Brockden Brown’s important novel Arthur Mervyn (1799). Brown’s text exposes the twin, Lockean foundations of U.S. political, racial, and financial ...
More
In chapter 3, I focus on Charles Brockden Brown’s important novel Arthur Mervyn (1799). Brown’s text exposes the twin, Lockean foundations of U.S. political, racial, and financial communities—property and personhood—as Gothic conjurations rather than as solid, common things. Brown’s novel shows how property and its ruinous “pest” work together to coproduce the illusion of the modern subject: if Lockean property is a romance of contagion enabling the subject to connect itself, through a labor of prosthesis, to a world of property, then the pest names the “thing” that animates its ruin. No matter in which direction these circuits flow—toward accretion or decomposition, toward civilization or destitution—their contagious current produces the fantasy of isolated-but-connected subjects who inhabit a world of private, ownable things. In Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief (1843), these same immunitary processes are converted into a regime of Gothic effects that include metempsychosis, mesmerism, and galvanic reanimation. Instead of ridiculing these special effects, the texts in this chapter show how they help to congeal the Anglo Saxon’s “fleshly matrix” of spirit, matter, and personhood.Less
In chapter 3, I focus on Charles Brockden Brown’s important novel Arthur Mervyn (1799). Brown’s text exposes the twin, Lockean foundations of U.S. political, racial, and financial communities—property and personhood—as Gothic conjurations rather than as solid, common things. Brown’s novel shows how property and its ruinous “pest” work together to coproduce the illusion of the modern subject: if Lockean property is a romance of contagion enabling the subject to connect itself, through a labor of prosthesis, to a world of property, then the pest names the “thing” that animates its ruin. No matter in which direction these circuits flow—toward accretion or decomposition, toward civilization or destitution—their contagious current produces the fantasy of isolated-but-connected subjects who inhabit a world of private, ownable things. In Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief (1843), these same immunitary processes are converted into a regime of Gothic effects that include metempsychosis, mesmerism, and galvanic reanimation. Instead of ridiculing these special effects, the texts in this chapter show how they help to congeal the Anglo Saxon’s “fleshly matrix” of spirit, matter, and personhood.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823229406
- eISBN:
- 9780823240982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823229406.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the ...
More
This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the melancholy logic of the last produces deterritorializing effects on both sides of the Atlantic, but with a distinctively racialized cast in America. Anglophone romanticism in general was agitated by what he characterized as the political restlessness of a post-tyrannical world. His main focus is on two American novels, Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) and John Neal's Logan: A Family History (1822). An initial sense of the essential continuities and crucial differences between the English and American variants of the logic of the last can be gained, if one turns briefly to The Last Man (1826), Shelley's morose novel about the destruction of humankind by a global plague.Less
This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the melancholy logic of the last produces deterritorializing effects on both sides of the Atlantic, but with a distinctively racialized cast in America. Anglophone romanticism in general was agitated by what he characterized as the political restlessness of a post-tyrannical world. His main focus is on two American novels, Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) and John Neal's Logan: A Family History (1822). An initial sense of the essential continuities and crucial differences between the English and American variants of the logic of the last can be gained, if one turns briefly to The Last Man (1826), Shelley's morose novel about the destruction of humankind by a global plague.
Jared Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036705
- eISBN:
- 9780252093814
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036705.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant ...
More
This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant shift from novel-writing to periodical culture. In particular, the chapter examines the career 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—Hannah Webster Foster, whose career witnesses an even more abrupt turn away from the novel.Less
This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant shift from novel-writing to periodical culture. In particular, the chapter examines the career 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—Hannah Webster Foster, whose career witnesses an even more abrupt turn away from the novel.
Matthew Garrett
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199346530
- eISBN:
- 9780199346554
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199346530.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Chapter 3 looks to the wide field of novelistic production in the period to analyze two aspects of literary structure: plotting and narrative discourse. The episode is a problem of plotting within ...
More
Chapter 3 looks to the wide field of novelistic production in the period to analyze two aspects of literary structure: plotting and narrative discourse. The episode is a problem of plotting within the field of literary production; and this problem with plotting is paradoxically also a formal solution to the problem of emplotment within the early national political imagination—that is, of the narrativization of competing claims about what will constitute a desirable social and political future. Through close attention to Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart, Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, and the anonymous History of Constantius and Pulchera, the chapter shows how episodic narrative in the novel functions as a form of hesitation, in terms of both narrative structure and sociopolitical meaning. In this fiction, the lack of integration of the parts into the whole reveals a formal hesitation before the historical challenges of the early republic.Less
Chapter 3 looks to the wide field of novelistic production in the period to analyze two aspects of literary structure: plotting and narrative discourse. The episode is a problem of plotting within the field of literary production; and this problem with plotting is paradoxically also a formal solution to the problem of emplotment within the early national political imagination—that is, of the narrativization of competing claims about what will constitute a desirable social and political future. Through close attention to Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart, Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, and the anonymous History of Constantius and Pulchera, the chapter shows how episodic narrative in the novel functions as a form of hesitation, in terms of both narrative structure and sociopolitical meaning. In this fiction, the lack of integration of the parts into the whole reveals a formal hesitation before the historical challenges of the early republic.
Michelle Sizemore
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190627539
- eISBN:
- 9780190627553
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190627539.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This ...
More
This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This phenomenon occurred in both the political and religious realms, as demonstrated in the popular republican expression “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God) and in the prophecies of the Second Great Awakening. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) brings together the political and religious culture of prophecy in his novel about ventriloquism, an early exploration of political theology, that is, a study of the ways in which theological principles infuse republican political arrangements.Less
This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This phenomenon occurred in both the political and religious realms, as demonstrated in the popular republican expression “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God) and in the prophecies of the Second Great Awakening. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) brings together the political and religious culture of prophecy in his novel about ventriloquism, an early exploration of political theology, that is, a study of the ways in which theological principles infuse republican political arrangements.
Elizabeth Fenton
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195384093
- eISBN:
- 9780199893584
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195384093.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter links the anti-Catholic anxieties evident in early national novels to Federalist-era debates about the relationship between a nation’s territorial scope and its capacity to protect the ...
More
This chapter links the anti-Catholic anxieties evident in early national novels to Federalist-era debates about the relationship between a nation’s territorial scope and its capacity to protect the liberties of diverse citizens. Federalists argued that a large territory would best support a democratic government, while opponents argued that an expanding frontier would produce despotism. In Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland (1798) and Catharine Sedgwick’s historical romance Hope Leslie (1827), the Catholic embodies these debates, as it both threatens to undermine democratic practice at nation’s edge and represents the kind of minority position that said practice intends to protect. The chapter concludes with analysis of Lyman Beecher’s infamous anti-Catholic diatribe A Plea for the West (1835), an explicit articulation of concern that the expanding nation could fall prey to Catholicism at the frontier and thereby relinquish its commitments to liberty.Less
This chapter links the anti-Catholic anxieties evident in early national novels to Federalist-era debates about the relationship between a nation’s territorial scope and its capacity to protect the liberties of diverse citizens. Federalists argued that a large territory would best support a democratic government, while opponents argued that an expanding frontier would produce despotism. In Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland (1798) and Catharine Sedgwick’s historical romance Hope Leslie (1827), the Catholic embodies these debates, as it both threatens to undermine democratic practice at nation’s edge and represents the kind of minority position that said practice intends to protect. The chapter concludes with analysis of Lyman Beecher’s infamous anti-Catholic diatribe A Plea for the West (1835), an explicit articulation of concern that the expanding nation could fall prey to Catholicism at the frontier and thereby relinquish its commitments to liberty.
Christine Yao
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474401616
- eISBN:
- 9781474418553
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401616.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar ...
More
This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.Less
This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.
Michelle Burnham
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198840893
- eISBN:
- 9780191876516
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198840893.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth ...
More
This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth century. The novel draws from accounts of the Pacific and Siberia by such figures as Maurice Benyowsky, August von Kotzebue, and John Ledyard. Ormond embodies many of the features of the new merchant millionaires whose Philadelphia fortunes derived from transoceanic speculations in the East India trade. Such a transoceanic context aligns Ormond’s revolutionary politics with the logic and temporality of global finance capital rather than the Illuminati conspiracy with which he is often associated. Similarly, the narrative pace of Ormond mimics the expectant temporalities of financial investment and revolutionary discourse to show how seductive spectacles of the future distract us from the present acts of violence necessary to arrive at them.Less
This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth century. The novel draws from accounts of the Pacific and Siberia by such figures as Maurice Benyowsky, August von Kotzebue, and John Ledyard. Ormond embodies many of the features of the new merchant millionaires whose Philadelphia fortunes derived from transoceanic speculations in the East India trade. Such a transoceanic context aligns Ormond’s revolutionary politics with the logic and temporality of global finance capital rather than the Illuminati conspiracy with which he is often associated. Similarly, the narrative pace of Ormond mimics the expectant temporalities of financial investment and revolutionary discourse to show how seductive spectacles of the future distract us from the present acts of violence necessary to arrive at them.
Hoang Gia Phan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814738474
- eISBN:
- 9780814738931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814738474.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter argues that the early American novel destabilized traditional republican conceptions of virtue and credibility through literary form. The shared epistemological forms and narrative ...
More
This chapter argues that the early American novel destabilized traditional republican conceptions of virtue and credibility through literary form. The shared epistemological forms and narrative structures of texts such as James Wilson's Lectures on Law and Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn show that legal theorists repeatedly rely upon the distinct realm of aesthetic judgment to decide the truth of legal and historical facts. Situating both the novel and the Anglo-American theories of evidence in relation to Enlightenment theories of natural language, the chapter claims that Brown's work is an exemplary of the migration of procedures for ascertaining historical facts from the sphere of law to that of the novel.Less
This chapter argues that the early American novel destabilized traditional republican conceptions of virtue and credibility through literary form. The shared epistemological forms and narrative structures of texts such as James Wilson's Lectures on Law and Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn show that legal theorists repeatedly rely upon the distinct realm of aesthetic judgment to decide the truth of legal and historical facts. Situating both the novel and the Anglo-American theories of evidence in relation to Enlightenment theories of natural language, the chapter claims that Brown's work is an exemplary of the migration of procedures for ascertaining historical facts from the sphere of law to that of the novel.
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479871674
- eISBN:
- 9781479888160
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479871674.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter turns to Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, arguing that it predicts the dynamic operation of the Founders system. The subtitle of Brown's novel—or, The Secret ...
More
This chapter turns to Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, arguing that it predicts the dynamic operation of the Founders system. The subtitle of Brown's novel—or, The Secret Witness—seems the perfect evocation of the Foucauldian panoptical paradigm, an allusion to a series of monitory institutions and discourses. All those representations of witness reference a plethora of well-known social anxieties of the period, from fears of immigrant radicalism to the changing norms of economic exchange, as well as the reconstruction of boundaries between public and private spheres. The driving force behind this metaphorical witness is the dominant ideology of the period: the republicanism described by the historians of the past generation. The chapter highlights the Constantia-Ormond relationship and how these characters reflect the novel's attempts to think of a way beyond republicanism, and towards the development of political fantasy.Less
This chapter turns to Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, arguing that it predicts the dynamic operation of the Founders system. The subtitle of Brown's novel—or, The Secret Witness—seems the perfect evocation of the Foucauldian panoptical paradigm, an allusion to a series of monitory institutions and discourses. All those representations of witness reference a plethora of well-known social anxieties of the period, from fears of immigrant radicalism to the changing norms of economic exchange, as well as the reconstruction of boundaries between public and private spheres. The driving force behind this metaphorical witness is the dominant ideology of the period: the republicanism described by the historians of the past generation. The chapter highlights the Constantia-Ormond relationship and how these characters reflect the novel's attempts to think of a way beyond republicanism, and towards the development of political fantasy.
