Charles Brockden Brown
Birthday	Thursday, January 17, 1771
Birthplace	Philadelphia, PA
Died	Thursday, February 22, 1810
Nationality	American
Occupation	novelist, historian, editor

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Brown, Charles Brockden

Born Jan. 17, 1771, in Philadelphia; died there Feb. 22, 1810. American writer.

Brown was one of the forerunners of romanticism in the literature of the USA. He was the son of a Quaker merchant and studied jurisprudence. In the dialogue Alcuin (1798), which was written under the influence of W. Godwin, Brown came out in defense of equal rights for women. In the novel Wieland, or the Transformation (1798), he told about an American family that fell victim to an adventurer. The triumph of justice over the forces of evil is the main idea in the novels Arthur Mervyn (vols. 1-2, 1799-1800) and Ormond (1799). In the novel Edgar Huntly (1799), Brown was the first to examine the life of the Indians.

WORKS

The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings. New York, 1943.
Novels, vols. 1-6. Philadelphia, 1887.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Clark, D. L. Charles Brockden Brown, a Critical Biography. [No place, 1923.]

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Among their topics are US letters on Puerto Rico and Cuba 1831-35, the authentic fictional letters of Charles Brockden Brown, Cherokee Catharine Brown's epistolary performances, John Brown's prison letters and the traditions of American protest literature, editing Mercy Otis Warren's letters, and imagining African American women's history 1854-68 in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends (1999).

Letters and cultural transformations in the United States, 1760-1860

Weyler claims that early American texts such as Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn were, in fact, sites of regulation and control.

Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814

Equality of men and women in the spheres of culture, economics, politics, and society was propounded by Charles Brockden Brown in Alcuin, a novel holding that men and women had more in common than in dispute.

1795-1799: Sports; social issues and crime; folkways; fashion; holidays

The end of the 18th century saw the beginnings of the American novel in works like Susanna Rowson's <IR> CHARLOTTE TEMPLE </IR> (1791); Hugh Henry Brackenridge's <IR> MODERN CHIVALRY </IR> (1792-1815); Gilbert Imlay's <IR> THE EMIGRANTS </IR> (1793); William Hill Brown's <IR> THE POWER OF SYMPATHY </IR> (1789); and most impressive of all, in Charles Brockden Brown's <IR> WIELAND </IR> (1798) and subsequent works.

History of American Literature: The Revolution to 1830

She finds support for the project by Cotton Mather and several Chesapeake writers, Benjamin Franklin and Royall Tyler just after US independence, and Charles Brockden Brown and Judith Sargent Murray in a society they said no longer enshrined classical republican virtue.

Securing the commonwealth; debt, speculation, and writing in the making of early America. (reprint, 2006)

Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, with Related Texts, by Charles Brockden Brown, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 269pp., $12.95; ISBN 0872208532.

Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, with Related Texts

Charles Brockden Brown legitimated the captive narrative in <IR> EDGAR HUNTLY </IR> (1799) by transferring it into the realm of avowed fiction.

Indian captivity narratives