Title The romance of real life : Charles Brockden Brown and the origins of American culture / Steven Watts

Published Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019 ©1994

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Description 1 online resource (xviii, 246 pages) Contents 1. The Novel and the Market in the Early Republic -- 2. The Lawyer and the Rhapsodist -- 3. The Young Artist as Social Visionary -- 4. The Major Novels (I): Fiction and Fragmentation -- 5. The Major Novels (II): Deception and Disintegration -- 6. The Writer as Bourgeois Moralist -- 7. The Writer and the Liberal Ego Summary Among the leading writers of the early republic, Charles Brockden Brown often appears as a romantic prototype - the brilliant, alienated author rejected by a utilitarian, materialistic American society. In The Romance of Real Life Steven Watts reinterprets Brown's life and work as a complex case study in the emerging culture of capitalism at the dawn of the nineteenth century Offering a revisionist view of Brown himself, Watts examines the major novels of the 1790s as well as previously neglected sources - from early essays and private letters to late-career forays into journalism, political pamphleteering, serial fiction, and cultural criticism. The result is a fuller picture of Brown as a man of letters in post-Revolutionary America, a man who rigorously analyzed the public and private vagaries of individual agency His notoriously volatile private life, it turns out, in many ways flowed from a critique of market society and its impulses Watts also shows how Brown's experience was central to broader developments: the rise of the novel in America, the development of gender and family formulations, the clash between republican "virtue" and liberal "self-interest," and the origins of a bourgeois creed of self-control. Perhaps most importantly, he explains how Brown helped articulate a notion of "culture" itself as a civilizing force to restrain restless liberal individualism The Romance of Real Life shows how a sensitive, prolific writer confronted, wrestled with, and ultimately promoted the emergence of a liberal society in nineteenth-century America Analysis English fiction United States Notes 78515 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-241) and index Notes Print version record Subject Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810. SUBJECT Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810 Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810 fast Brown, Charles Brockden. swd Subject Authors and readers -- United States -- History -- 18th century National characteristics, American, in literature. Novelists, American -- 18th century -- Biography Authorship -- History -- 18th century Romanticism -- United States Authors and readers Authorship Civilization National characteristics, American, in literature Novelists, American Romanticism Cultuur. SUBJECT United States -- Civilization -- 1783-1865. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85139937 Subject United States Genre/Form Biographies History Biographies. Biographies. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781421436043 1421436043

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