Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic

The fifth chapter of the book moves across the Atlantic to consider the influential author of the early American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. Although scholars have examined classical themes in certain branches of his published work, this chapter gives the first comprehensive vision of classicism in Brown, taking into account his novels, short fiction, and periodical writing. Overall, his texts communicate a powerful skepticism about the status and value of antiquity in the new nation, although Brown himself is not reticent about demonstrating his own classical erudition. The chapter centers around readings of two of Brown’s novels: Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), with its sinister vision of superstitious reverence for the Roman orator Cicero, and Ormond (1799), which encourages readers to question the conservative, classicizing vision of American culture voiced by the novel’s own narrator, Sophia. Brown’s novels illustrate well what John C. Shields has called the “acceptance and denial” pattern of American classicism, in which writers assert their own status and learning through the use of classical literature and ideas, and yet simultaneously call for a progressive departure from desiccated European tradition. The Gothic is the perfect genre for capturing that contradiction, since it expresses in sinister terms the lingering power of history over contemporary minds.

Stories without Plots

This chapter explains how the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical essay describes the modern economy as a complex system. Specifically distinguishing itself from the novel, the periodical (or Addisonian) essay narrates economic causality as multiplex and contingent: economic relations cannot be plotted around individual protagonists. The chapter offers a history of the importance of the periodical essay in American literature, and specifically focuses on the examples of the genre by Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown. Although these writers represent very different ideological positions, they each use the generic affordances of the periodical essay to depict the intricate dependencies that constitute global capitalism. The periodical essay thus presents a belletristic form that functions similarly to Hamilton’s policy writing: speculative fictions that narrate the possible consequences that descend from individual moments of production, exchange, and consumption.

Brown Studies Now and in Transition

This chapter examines the state of the field of Charles Brockden Brown studies since 2000. Taking a thematic approach, I discuss four dominant strands in twenty-first-century criticism: geographies, medical humanities, economies, and aesthetics. These sections cover the scholarly debate over a transnational, imperial, or postcolonial Brown; consider the new ways in which early national medicine intersects with his fiction; chart the rise of market and class-based criticism; and discuss a return to formal concerns in light of the aesthetic or postcritique turn. The final section of this chapter looks ahead to emergent trends in future Brown scholarship in response to the previous decade’s work.

Brown’s Later Biographers and Reception, 1949–2000s

Biography and reception of Charles Brockden Brown since the mid-twentieth century was marked by efforts to canonize him and to recover primary and related texts. The first generation of this era typically practiced formalist readings and focused primarily on Brown’s first four novels. Often psychobiographical, these studies created a “Gothic” and proto-Romantic Brown. Later generations have expanded the canon to include Brown’s work over his lifetime, including the many genres he worked in; have practiced more cultural and poststructuralist methodologies with an eye to gender and sexuality, geography, race, and class; have placed Brown in a more global context; and have brought Brown studies into the era of digital humanities.