The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides an up-to-date survey of the life of and full range of writings by Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and U.S. Early Republic. Through the late twentieth century, Brockden Brown was best known as an important author of political romances in the gothic mode that were widely influential in romantic era, and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel. More recent work recognizes him likewise an influential editor, historian, and writer in other genres such as poetry, short fiction, and essays, and as a figure whose work resonated throughout the Atlantic world of the revolutionary age. The Oxford Handbook’s thirty-five chapters build on the research of the most recently scholarly generation to introduce readers to and explore Brown’s wide-ranging work. Its chapters focus on the author’s biography, romances, writings in a range of genres, his key concept of the romance as a form of engaged conjectural history, his engagements in the cultural-ideological struggles of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, as well as the aesthetic, political, scientific, and other key dimensions of his corpus. The volume concludes with a survey of Brown’s complex reception history and the state of Brown studies at present.