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).
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.
(5) Roland Hagenbuchle, "American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Epistemology: The Example of
Charles Brockden Brown," EAL, 23 (1988), 123.
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.
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.
The Collected Writings of
Charles Brockden Brown. Vol.
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.
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.
Charles Brockden Brown initiated the American Gothic literary tradition with his 1798 novel Wieland; or the Transformation, and he contributed to it with his later works Edgar Huntley (1799), Ormond (1799), and Arthur Mervyn (1800).
More than a century before
Charles Brockden Brown conceived a novel based on "incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness,"(1) Mary Rowlandson had survived her three month captivity with "savages" warring against settlers in New England.
Charles Brockden Brown legitimated the captive narrative in <IR> EDGAR HUNTLY </IR> (1799) by transferring it into the realm of avowed fiction.
She invites readers to look beyond the discussions of domesticity and nationalism that have dominated studies of the early Gothic and instead establishes how a range of Gothic texts--from Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho to
Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West Indian Proprietor--served as transnational tools for reform.
