My son, there's nothing insignificant in this world. But first and foremost is, among all earthly things, and place. --Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein 2.1, 10-12 In spring of 1798, just months before publishing six novels in less than three years, Charles Brockden Brown wrote The Man at Home, a series of thirteen sketches that appeared in Weekly Magazine. For most part, The Man at Home has been dismissed as a minor and fragmentary work, a very loosely structured series of reflections on debt and property, where Brown first developed plotlines that later would be elaborated in novels. But I believe text holds much greater significance for understanding how Brown used serial publication as a performative vehicle. In effect, Brown uses series to create unity through repetition and ultimately suggests a program of resistance to condition of modern seriality. Through a literary motif that I will refer to as chronotope Brown articulates an alternate space-time, one that gradually reveals links between present and past. In other words, The Man at Home applies a theory of historical fiction that Brown would later distinguish as romance, and equally important, suggests a relation between writer and reader that demands imaginative engagement as a prelude to collective action. In what follows, I will explore three key terms, lazaretto-chronotope-series, as a means of defining Brown's authorial project in The Man at Home and its unrealized polemical potential. First, as a literary motif, lazaretto suggests an othered space that exists both within and outside constraints of society. (1) In temporal sense, lazaretto articulates with present in a way that offers a critical perspective on conflict between a communal republican ideal and emergent liberal individualism in new US nation. Second, I argue that lazaretto is best understood as a Bahktinian chronotope, a concrete literary expression of a new historical epoch. As M. M. Bakhtin notes, in chronotope spatial and temporal are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole (84); furthermore, literary chronotopes are the primary means for materializing in space.... It can be said without qualification that to them belongs meaning that shapes narrative (250). Brown's choices of spatial and temporal indicators in The Man at Home offer a fascinating and complex example of how he constructed his own position as author through hidden historical allusions. Finally, in his use of series, both as a literary form and in its theoretical sense, Brown subverts very homogeneous empty time that Benedict Anderson treats as a precondition for imagined community of nation. Although The Man at Home is often ignored in favor of novels, text reveals an approach to historical writing that Brown followed throughout his career, and it serves as a point of origin for plots of both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn. Its concealed allusive structure, especially in relation to and place, stresses significance of historical setting and also of secrecy, both important elements in early US novel. The Man at Home is set in present, Philadelphia in 1798, and is written from perspective of a retired merchant who has lost his life's savings after securing a failed loan for an old business partner. Faced with reality of losing all his property or going to debtors' prison, narrator decides to conceal himself in a boardinghouse room run by his washerwoman, Kate. In room--which, of course, is not his true home--the narrator ruminates on his condition, occupying his by writing during period of self-imposed exile from society. What follows seems like a series of random observations of room, followed by various essayistic reflections and historical sketches about room's previous tenants. …