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Over the past few decades, the writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) have reclaimed a place of prominence in the American literary canon. Yet despite the explosion of teaching, research, and an ever-increasing number of doctoral dissertations, there remains no up-to-date overview of Brown's work. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides a state-of-the-art survey of the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown, a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and U.S. Early Republic. The seven novels he published during his lifetime are now studied for their narrative complexity, innovations in genre, and social-political commentaries on life in early America and the revolutionary Atlantic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown was best known as an author of political romances in the gothic mode that proved to be widely influential in romantic era, and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel. This Handbook extends its focus beyond the well-known novels to address the full range of Brown's prolific literary career. The Handbook includes original essays on all of Brown's fiction and nonfiction writings, and offers new interpretations of the contexts of his work: from the literary, social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The thirty-five contributors in this volume speak in new ways about Brown's depictions of literary theory, social justice, sexuality, and property relations, as well as colonialism, slavery, Native Americans, and women's rights. Brown's perspectives on American and global history, emerging modernity, selfhood and otherness, and other topics, are explained in comprehensible and up-to-date terms. In addition to opening up new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides the intellectual foundations needed to understand Brown's enduring impact and literary legacy.

Excerpt from Brockden Brown and the Rights of Women One cannot correctly appraise the literature dealing with the social and political emancipation of women in the last third of the eighteenth century without some knowledge of the evolution of the thought of which that literature is a record. Particularly is this so in evaluating the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Brockden Brown. It is too generally assumed that the first two were the originators of the social theories that are now so invariably associated with their names; and that their work in turn inspired Brockden Brown in America. Although a detailed study of the struggle for the social and political freedom of women is beyond the scope of the present work, certain general tendencies in the literature of revolt in England, France, and America, will be briefly traced. As a matter of fact neither Mary Wollstonecraft, nor William Godwin, nor yet Brockden Brown was an original thinker, for there is nothing really new in any of them. Mary Wollstonecraft in her Rights of Women (1792), and Godwin in his Political Justice (1793) and in his novels, did, however, put the arguments for the social emancipation of men and women in imperishable form, and thus established their chief claim to a place in the literature of the movement. Brockden Brown was familiar with the works of these writers, but he was also familiar with what had been done by others earlier than the time of Godwin. It can be shown that Brown was full of the revolutionary spirit before the appearance of the Rights of Women and Political Justice, and that the influence of these two works upon Brown has been overemphasized. Theories of government and social reform are so much a part of Brown's life and writings that some account of them in relation to his predecessors seems necessary. Brown's political theories were shaped by Locke and his French and American disciples. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

On Wieland; or the Transformation: "An impressive edition . . . the most thoroughly satisfying historical and literary contextualization for the novel that I've ever encountered. Shapiro and Barnard offer a rich transatlantic artistic and ideological context that helps pull the whole novel into coherent focus. The footnotes to the novel are incredibly thorough, helpful, and interesting. . . . This Hackett edition of Wieland [is] the freshest and most topical of those now available." --Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University On Ormond; or, the Secret Witness: "Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro have produced an awesome edition of Brown's Ormond by providing copious explanatory notes and helpful documentation of the essential historical context of feminist, radical, egalitarian, and abolitionist expression. Oh, ye patriots, read it and learn!" --Peter Linebaugh, University of Toledo On Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793: "This new edition of Arthur Mervyn far exceeds any previous version of this remarkable American novel. Through exhaustive archival research, the editors have produced a reliable text constructed within the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious contexts of a society informing Brown's efforts to capture and preserve the formation of the early republic for generations of readers and cultural historians. This vital text is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the United States." --Emory Elliott, University Professor, University of California-Riverside On Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker: "This is now the edition of choice for those of us who teach Brown's fascinating Edgar Huntly. Barnard and Shapiro explore the relevant historical, cultural, and literary backgrounds in their illuminating Introduction; they skillfully annotate the text; they provide useful and up-to-date bibliographies; and they append a number of revealing primary texts for further cultural contextualization. This edition will help to stimulate new thinking about race, empire, and sexuality in Brown's prescient novel of the American frontier." --Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland

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This study of the works of late eighteenth-century American Gothic author Charles Brockden Brown argues that Brown was a seminal figure in the development of four forms of Gothic fiction: the Frontier Gothic, the Urban Gothic, the Psychological Gothic, and the Female Gothic.

Written in 1954 and published in 1981, this fascinating study remains authoritative as an account of a body of opinion about women’s nature and role that was in vogue in America during the first half-century after independence. Combining intellectual and social history, this work was one of numerous attempts being made at the time to add depth to American social history dealing with women and women’s experiences before feminism. The author explores British sources of American thought as well, presenting an early comparative history, and offers a focus on religion to show how processes of change to ideas about women occurred.