Charles Brockden Brown is known as the "Father of the American novel"
and is considered to be our first professional author. At least by
those who do consider him at all. To be perfectly frank, I'd never
really heard of the guy before now. But this excellent gothic tale,
which was based on the true story of a farmer who thought that angels had
commanded him to kill his own family, is so clearly the forerunner
of the fiction of everyone from Hawthorne and Melville
to Poe and Henry
James to H.P. Lovecraft
and Robert E. Howard right on up to Shirley
Jackson and Stephen King, that
it is hard to believe that his work is not better known nor taught more
often.
Wieland, his first novel, tells the story of a religious fanatic who
builds a temple in the seclusion of his own farm, but then is struck dead,
apparently by spontaneous combustion. Several years later, his children,
in turn, begin to hear voices around the family property, voices which
alternately seem to be commanding good or evil and which at times imitate
denizens of the farm. Are the voices somehow connected to a mysterious
visitor who has begun hanging around? Are they commands from God?
From demons? Suffice it to say things get pretty dicey before we
find out the truth.
This is a terrific creepy story which obviously influenced the course
of American fiction. Brown develops an interesting serious theme
of the role that reason can play in combating superstition and religious
mania, but keeps the action cranking and the mood deliciously gloomy.
The language is certainly not modern but it is accessible and generally
understandable. It's a novel that should be
better known and more widely read, if not for historical reasons then
just because it's great fun.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (A)
Websites:
Book-related and General Links:
-Encyclopaedia
Britannica: Your search: "Charles Brockden Brown"
-PAL:
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)(AL: Perspectives in American Literature:
A Research and Reference Guide)
-BIO:
From Evert A. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, (New York:
C. Scribner, 1856): CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN
-Charles
Brockden Brown (1771-1810)(American Literature on the Web)
-TEACHERS'
GUIDE: Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)( Contributing Editor: Carla
Mulford)
-Collection
Guide: Charles Brockden Brown papers (Bowdoin College)
-ETEXT:
Wieland; or the Transformation: An American Tale (Electronic Text Center,
University of Virginia Library)
-ANNOTATED
ETEXTS: of Charles Brockden Brown (Self Knowledge)
-REVIEW:
of Charles Brockden Brown Three Gothic Novels. Wieland: Or, The Transformation.
Arthur Mervyn: Or, Memoirs of the Year (Caleb Crain, NY Times Book Review)
-ESSAY:
Sleep-Walking Out of the Revolution: Brown's Edgar Huntly (Paul
Downes, Journal of 18th Century Studies)
-EXCERPT:
from INTRODUCTION to American Gothic Tales (Joyce Carol
Oates)
-ESSAY:
Charles Brockden Brown and Elihu Smith in the New York Epidemic of 1798
(Bob Arnebeck)
GENERAL:
-ETEXTS:
The Electronic Archive of Early American Fiction (UVA)
-American
Literature on the Web (Akihito Ishikawa)
-The
Literary Gothic
-Writing
the Fever: explores some of writing spawned by the yellow fever epidemics
of the 1790s
-A
STUDENT'S HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: Part-5: Chapter-2 (Bibliomania)
-ESSAY:
Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity (Annette Kolodny, NY Times
Book Review)
-REVIEW:
Frederick Crews: Whose American Renaissance?, NY Review of Books
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS
ESSAY
American Renaissance: Art
and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F.O. Matthiessen
The American Renaissance
Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83
The Unusable Past: Theory
and the Study of American Literature by Russell J. Reising
Ideology and Classic American
Literature edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen
Visionary Compacts: American
Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context by Donald E. Pease
Sensational Designs: The
Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 by Jane Tompkins
Beneath the American Renaissance:
The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David
S. Reynolds
Hard Facts: Setting and
Form in the American Novel by Philip Fisher
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