Charles Brockden Brown

During most of the 1790s, Brown developed his literary ambitions in projects that often remained incomplete (for example the so-called "Henrietta Letters," transcribed in the Clark biography) and frequently used his correspondence with friends as a sort of laboratory for narrative experiments. His first publications appeared during the late 1780s (e.g. "The Rhapsodist" essay series from 1789), but generally he published little during this period. By 1798, however, these formative years gave way to a period of novel-writing during which Brown published the titles for which he is best known. In complex ways, these novels and the rest of Brown's career are informed by the progressive ideas he uses and develops from the period's British radical-democratic writers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage. Brown was influenced by these writers and in turn exerted an influence on them and their younger studiers, for example in Godwin's later novels, or in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, who reread Brown as she wrote her novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826). Novels During a novelistic phase that lasted from 1798 until late 1801, Brown published the Wollstonecraftian-feminist dialog Alcuin (1798), and seven subsequent novels. An additional novel was written, but was lost by a series of mishaps and consequently never saw publication. In addition to his output of novels, Brown also became an editor during this period and, along with his friends in New York published and wrote many short articles and reviews for The Monthly Magazine and American Review from April 1799 to December 1800, as well as its short-lived successor, The American Review and Literary Journal (1801–1802). Finally, besides these two New York periodicals, Brown also published numerous fictional pieces, including the only surviving fragment of his first novel Sky-Walk, in the Philadelphia-based Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence (1798–1799). Brown's novels are often characterized simply as gothic fiction, although the model he develops is far from the Gothic romance mode of writers such as Ann Radcliffe. Brown's novels combine several revolutionary-era fiction subgenres with other types of late-Enlightenment scientific and medical knowledge. Most notably, they develop the British radical-democratic models of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Holcroft and combine these with elements of German "Schauer-romantik" gothic from Friedrich Schiller, the enlightened sentimental fictions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Laurence Sterne, women's domestic novels by writers such as Fanny Burney or Hannah Webster Foster, and other genres such as captivity narrative. Brown builds plots around particular motifs such as sleepwalking and religious mania, drawing on Enlightenment-era medical writings by people such as Erasmus Darwin. Of the seven novels extant, the first four to be published in book form (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) have received the lion's share of commentary and attention. Because of their sensational violence, dramatic intensity, and intellectual complexity, these four novels are often referred to as the "gothic" or "Godwinian" novels. Stephen Calvert, which appeared only in serialized form and in the posthumous 1815 biography, remained little-read until the end of the 20th century, but is notable as the first US novel to thematize same-sex sexuality. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot have been regarded sometimes as relatively conventional works distinct from the earlier novels because they have classic epistolary form and concern domestic issues that seem very different from the violence and sensationalism of the first four novels. Recent scholarship (since the 1980s), however, has largely revised this view and emphasizes the continuities and overall coherence of all seven novels understood as a loosely unified ensemble.