SOURCE: "Charles Brockden Brown as a Novelist of Ideas," in Books at Brown, Vol. XX, 1965, pp. 165–84.

In the following essay, Hirsch maintains that Brown utilized a combination of genres—the sentimental novel of seduction and the gothic romance—in order to advance his French-influenced philosophic ideas.

The historian Bernard Faÿ observes "a curious phenomenon" in serious American literature of the late eighteenth century: "French writers roused American minds and created original reactions in them at a time when English writers were less interesting and stimulating, but afforded examples that could easily be utilized and imitated. French culture in America was a means of liberation, not a model to be copied. Indeed its great role seems to have been to aid hardy and simple minds, who might have lacked enterprise or imagination, to find themselves and adopt a new spirit that should lead them to create a new form...