The American novelist and magazine editor Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was a predecessor of Edgar Allan Poe in horror fiction and a critic of contemporary literature. Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on Jan. 17, 1771, the...

From the years immediately after America gained its independence from England until long after, America's literati called for a literature that would reflect well on the artistic capacities of the new nation, a literature that could earn the respect of...

Charles Brockden Brown is best known as America's first professional man of letters, a novelist, publisher, and editor whose morally earnest Gothic tales attracted the attention of Keats and Shelley abroad and, among others, Poe and Hawthorne at home....

Charles Brockden Brown - (1771 - 1810) American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Brown is remembered as the author of the first Gothic novel produced by an American. Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), which draws on the traditions of...

Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 - February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper....

Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic. Edited by PHILIP BARNARD, MARK L. KAMRATH, and STEPHEN SHAPIRO. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 394 pp. Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. ...

If Charles Brockden Brown's major novels may be broadly identified by geography, it is apparent that they all gravitate around Philadelphia, though with varying degrees of focus on the city per se. Arthur Mervyn (referred to as "his Phila. Novel" [Smith, Diary 290])...

In the essay that follows, Fleischmann explores Brown's "systematic treatment" of women, their rights, and their roles in his novels. Fleischmann argues strongly in favor of the view that Brown was a feminist and also advocates Brown's "competence as a writer," but notes that there is no consensus (feminist or otherwise) in Brown scholarship.

In the following essay, Watts purports that Brown 's last two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot mark Brown's transition from the radicalism of his earlier novels to the middle-class, moralistic stance of his later essays and journalistic endeavors. Watts argues that in both Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, Brown uses "sentimental strategies and domestic devices" to present his belief that success and happiness can be achieved through a balance of male ambition and female self-re...

In the following essay, Cleman studies the main characters in Brown 's major novels and argues that their interrelationships demonstrate that the ambiguity in Brown 's work was purposeful and carefully constructed.