The Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown’s Fictitious Historiography

Emerson, Amanda

doi:10.1215/ddnov.040010125

Novel

2007

DOI: 10.1215/ddnov.040010125

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The Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown’s Fictitious Historiography

Amanda Emerson¹

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Cited by 4 publications

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“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

Hedlin¹

2014

J. Am. Stud.

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This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation (1798) as engaging with the distinctive “secular age” of the early republic, a volatile moment in American cultural history when such experiences as having visions and hearing voices, both prevalent in the novel, drew an array of religious and medical explanations. Drawing upon the work of theorists of new secular studies, I argue that the doubts of the novel's narrator Clara regarding who or what is responsible for her family's undoing signal the difficulty of storytelling in an age of spiritual and intellectual uncertainty. By thus reading Clara's indeterminacy as a reaction to the contrapuntal religious and medical discourses of the early republic, my essay offers new insight into the significance of her rhetorically strained, inconclusive attempt at rendering a didactic narrative. Rather than offering Clara merely as a negative example for readers – a victim of her own imperfect discipline, as she herself assesses – Brown utilizes her self-proclaimed failure to ironize the self-assuredness of eighteenth-century didactic novels in an age rife with doubt.

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“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

Hedlin¹

2014

J. Am. Stud.

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Introduction: Reading Early America with Charles Brockden Brown

Waterman¹

2009

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Charles Brockden Brown’s Lazaretto Chronotope Series: Secret History and “The Man at Home”

Letter¹

2015

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The Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown’s Fictitious Historiography

Cited by 4 publications

References 28 publications

“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

“Was There Not Reason to Doubt?”:Wielandand Its Secular Age

Introduction: Reading Early America with Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown’s Lazaretto Chronotope Series: Secret History and “The Man at Home”

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