Novels
- Arthur Mervyn (1794)
- Wieland (1798)
- Edgar Huntly (1799)
- Ormond (1799)
- Clara Howard (1801)
- Jane Talbot (1827)
Collections
- Somnambulism and other stories (1987)
- Carwin (1989)
- Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1990)
- Selected Prose Fiction of Charles Brockden Brown (1998)
- Three Gothic Novels (1998)
Novellas
- Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist (1803)
Non fiction
- Alcuin (1798)
- Address To The Government Of The United States On The Cession Of Louisiana (1963)
- A Prospectus of a System of General Geography (1989)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Novellas Book Covers
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Charles Brockden Brown Books Overview
Arthur Mervyn
Charles Brockden Brown 1771 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. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the ‘early American novel, ‘ or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and 1800s, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution. Among his works are: Wieland; or, The Transformation 1798, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep Walker 1799, Jane Talbot 1801, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist 1803 1805, and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 1799/1800.
Wieland
The first gothic novel in America, Wieland 1798 is now available in a Norton Critical Edition. Wieland, the story of religious delusions and horrific violence on the eve of the American Revolution, is the first gothic novel in America and a cornerstone of the Early American literary canon. A family living on an estate outside Philadelphia is visited first by a set of mysterious voices, seemingly coming out of thin air, followed soon after by an itinerant rustic named Carwin. Violence erupts when the family’s young patriarch believes he hears God s voice demanding a human sacrifice as a sign of faith. Testing the limits of religious and literary authority in the new United States, Brown s novel has for more than two centuries kept readers debating questions of agency, accountability, and revolutionary politics as the story s moral chaos unfolds. The editor provides explanatory annotation throughout the volume. This Norton Critical Edition also reprints Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, Brown s fragmentary sequel to Wieland. Sources and Contexts presents inspirations for Brown s work, including an account of the real life Yates family murders, an excerpt from Christoph Martin Wieland s The Trial of Abraham, as well as religious and medical accounts of delusion, spontaneous combustion, and ventriloquism. Brown s outline for Wieland and his letter to Thomas Jefferson are also reprinted. Criticism includes contemporary responses to the novel from both the United States and the United Kingdom along with fourteen essential modern critical approaches. Recent contributors include Shirley Samuels, Christopher Looby, Nancy Ruttenberg, Laura Korobkin, David Kazanjian, Bryan Waterman, and Stephen Shapiro, among others. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
Edgar Huntly
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ture, that this person was asleep. Such instances were not unknown to me, through the medium of conversation and books. Never, indeed, had it fallen under my own observation till now, and now it was conspicuous and environed with all that could give edge to suspicion, and vigor to inquiry. To stand here was no longer of use, and I turned my steps toward my uncle’s habitation. CHAPTER II. I Had food enough for the longest contemplation. My steps partook, as usual, of the vehemence of my thoughts, and I reached my uncle’s gate before I believed myself to have lost sight of the Elm. I looked up and discovered the well known habitation. I could not endure that my reflections should so speedily be interrupted. I, therefore, passed the gate, and stopped not till I had reached a neighboring summit, crowned with chesnut oaks and poplars. Here I more deliberately reviewed the incidents that had just occurred. The inference was just, that the man, half clothed and digging, was a sleeper; but what was the cause of mis morbid activity9 What was the mournful vision that dissolved him in tears, and extorted from him tokens of inconsolable distress9 What did he seek, or what endeavor to conceal in this fatal spot9 The incapacity of sound sleep denotes a mind sorely wounded. It is thus that atrocious criminals denote the possession of some dreadful secret. The thoughts, which considerations of safety enable them to suppress or disguise during wakefulness, operate without impediment, and exhibit their genuine effects, when the notices of sense are partly excluded, and they are shut out from a knowledge of their entire condition. This is the perpetrator of some nefarious deed. What but the murder of Waldegrave could direct his steps hither 9 His employment was part of some fantastic dr…
Ormond
As it tells the story of Constantia Dudley, from her family’s financial collapse to her encounters with a series of cosmopolitan revolutionaries and reactionaries, Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or The Secret Witness 1799 develops a sustained meditation on late Enlightenment debates concerning political liberty, women’s rights, conventions of sex gender, and their relation to the reshaping of an Atlantic world in the throes of transformation. This edition of Ormond includes Brown’s Alcuin 1798, an important dialogue on women’s rights and marriage, as well as his key essays on history and literature, along with selections from contemporary writings on women’s education and revolution debates that figure in the novel’s background and in the charged atmosphere of the late 1790s.
Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
The first gothic novel in America, Wieland 1798 is now available in a Norton Critical Edition. Wieland, the story of religious delusions and horrific violence on the eve of the American Revolution, is the first gothic novel in America and a cornerstone of the Early American literary canon. A family living on an estate outside Philadelphia is visited first by a set of mysterious voices, seemingly coming out of thin air, followed soon after by an itinerant rustic named Carwin. Violence erupts when the family’s young patriarch believes he hears God s voice demanding a human sacrifice as a sign of faith. Testing the limits of religious and literary authority in the new United States, Brown s novel has for more than two centuries kept readers debating questions of agency, accountability, and revolutionary politics as the story s moral chaos unfolds. The editor provides explanatory annotation throughout the volume. This Norton Critical Edition also reprints Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, Brown s fragmentary sequel to Wieland. Sources and Contexts presents inspirations for Brown s work, including an account of the real life Yates family murders, an excerpt from Christoph Martin Wieland s The Trial of Abraham, as well as religious and medical accounts of delusion, spontaneous combustion, and ventriloquism. Brown s outline for Wieland and his letter to Thomas Jefferson are also reprinted. Criticism includes contemporary responses to the novel from both the United States and the United Kingdom along with fourteen essential modern critical approaches. Recent contributors include Shirley Samuels, Christopher Looby, Nancy Ruttenberg, Laura Korobkin, David Kazanjian, Bryan Waterman, and Stephen Shapiro, among others. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.
Three Gothic Novels
Prefiguring the work of Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner, as well as the entire tradition of American noir and horror, Brockden Brown was America’s first professional novelist. This volume collects his most significant works: ‘Wieland; or The Transformation’ 1798, about a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist; ‘Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793’ 1799, with its devastating depiction of a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia; and ‘Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker’ 1799, which recasts traditional Gothic themes in the American wilderness.
Alcuin
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