DOCSLIB.ORG

University Microfilms International 300 N

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
University Microfilms International 300 N THE CRAFT OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN'S FICTION Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Russo, James Richard Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 04/10/2021 10:39:59 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/298591 INFORMATION TO USERS This was produced from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or notations which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure you of complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark it is an indication that the film inspector noticed either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, or duplicate copy. Unless we meant to delete copyrighted materials that should not have been filmed, you will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photo­ graphed the photographer has followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again—beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete. 4. For any illustrations that cannot be reproduced satisfactorily by xerography, photographic prints can be purchased at additional cost and tipped into your xerographic copy. Requests can be made to our Dissertations Customer Services Department. 5. Some pages in any document may have indistinct print. In all cases we have filmed the best available copy. University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR. Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW, LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND 8005528 Russo, JAMES RICHARD THE CRAFT OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN'S FICTION The University of Arizona PH.D. 1979 University Microfilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 18 Bedford Row, London WCIR 4EJ, England Copyright 1979 by Russo, James Richard All Rights Reserved THE CRAFT OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN'S FICTION by James Richard Russo A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 7 9 Copyright 1979 James Richard Russo THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by James Richard Russo entitled The Craft of Charles Brockden Brown's Fiction be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy isfertation' Director Q Date As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read this dissertation and agree that it may be presented for final defense. '*//?_?• jo/A/ 1°\ Date I' Date Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense thereof at the final oral examination. 11/78 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to bor­ rowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study could not have been written without the expert guid­ ance of Professor John Harmon McElroy, who has presided over my work on Brown since its embryonic stages several years ago and who has contrib­ uted many hours of careful reading and invaluable aid, as well as endless encouragement and inspiration. I also wish to thank Professors Edgar Dryden, Cecil Robinson, and Alan Burke for their sound advice. In addition, I am indebted to Everett Emerson and his specialist readers at Early American Literature whose suggestions and constructive criti­ cisms considerably strengthened the early chapters. A grant from The University of Arizona Graduate College, together with the David L. Patrick Scholarship, allowed me to complete both the research and the writing of this book. And finally, I owe special thanks to my wife Barbara, who kept me going when common sense and a feeble job market seemed to dictate timid surrender. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT v 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. WIELAND 6 3. ORMOND 57 4. ARTHUR MERVYN 94 5- EDGAR HUNTLY 137 6• STEPHEN CALVERT AND THE EPISTOLARY NOVELS 171 7. CONCLUSION 206 REFERENCES 229 iv ABSTRACT Charles Brockden Brown was not the hasty, careless writer he is so frequently characterized as being. The inconsistencies, improb­ abilities, and contradictions which riddle his novels are the result of unreliable narrators who lie, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, to the reader. All of Brown's novels have this feature (the unreliable narrator) in common. In Wieland, the story is told by a madwoman, Clara Wieland, who is unable to face an ugly truth about herself—that she is "polluted" by the loss of her virginity. This pivotal fact she conceals from both herself and the reader by blaming everything that occurs in the novel on her convenient scapegoat, Carwin (whose confession is related to us through her). In each of the novel's major scenes, it can be demon­ strated that Clara loses touch with reality and reports as fact that which cannot possibly be true. Brown's sources for Wieland, as well as the way in which he makes use of them, support such a reading. Similarly, Constantia Dudley's narrative in Ormond is a complex fabric of semi-plausible lies. The difference in comparison to Wieland is that Constantia is a conscious liar whose untruths are designed to conceal that she is a profligate, a forger, and a murderer. The noto­ rious inconsistencies in the characters of Marrinette, Helena Cleves, and (most significantly) Ormond himself are due to deliberate narrative lies that the attentive reader can trace through every major scene. v vi Arthur Mervyn is the story of one man's con game. In this, the most complex of Brown's novels, the narrator is not even who he claims to be, but rather a clever impostor. The novel is carefully layered, narratives embedded within narratives, each one providing evidence that contradicts what the man who calls himself Arthur Mervyn is telling us. Although no character in the novel sees through the imposture, Brown, through conflicting testimony of numerous other characters provides the reader with the information necessary to unmask the narrator as a seducer, a forger, and a murderer. Edgar Huntly is a psychological study of two men who are "un­ known to themselves." The evidence of both the text and Brown's sources (Skywalk and "Somnambulism") suggests that the narrator himself is the murderer of his friend Waldegrave. Thus Edgar's search for the murderer and his mysterious relationship with his double, Clithero Edny, make Huntly a novel of self-discovery. The twin narratives of Edgar and Clithero demonstrate that both men are driven by dark, hidden motives that they themselves do not understand. Brown's lesser known novels, Clara Howard, Jane Talbot, and Stephen Calvert also exhibit the characteristic unreliable narrator. In Calvert, the title character conceals from the reader the true nature of his relationship with the profligate Clelia Neville. Philip Stanley in Clara Howard is guilty of seduction and an attempted swindle, both of which he attempts to conceal. In Jane Talbot both principal characters lie in order to conceal Jane's marital infidelity. vii Brown's insistence upon writing such "hidden" fictions, in which the reader is at the mercy of a narrator who will not or cannot tell the truth may have been grounded in his belief that men and the world they inhabit may be a sham. Brown's illness, his tendency to berate himself, his habitual, morbid self-analysis, his unfounded suspicions that his closest friends secretly despised him, and perhaps, as Elihu Hubbard Smith suspected, a secret in his own past, may all have played a role in determining that belief and the kind of fiction Brown chose to write. At any rate, Brown, like Hawthorne, seems to have concluded that Truth could only be approached through indirection. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In "Charles Brockden Brown: A Bibliographical Essay," Paul Witherington states that in one respect Brown criticism has been remark­ ably consistent.1 Nearly all critics, he admits, agree that Brown's "structures were loose and inconsistent,"2 and that his "narrative technique has been generally derided."3 This has been ever since William Dunlap, Brown's friend and biographer, suggested that this novelist was naturally careless and given to writing hasty, confused narratives.11 While Brown may continue for the purpose of literary criticism to be considered a second-rate writer, one cannot help but notice that such a relegation is largely based on repeated allegations that his novels suffer from incoherent narratives, uniritegrated sub­ plots, awkward shifts in points of view, and inconsistent characters.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Charles Brockden Brown's Contagious Unreliability
    Charles Brockden Brown's Contagious Unreliability BEVERLY LYON CLARK, Wheaton College Modern novels like Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury reflect our sense of the world as increasingly fragmented and normless when they reject the comfortable supports of traditional fictional techniques. The use of less reliable narrators and of more open endings, for instance, distinguishes modern fiction from much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, although the difference is less pronounced in American fiction, in its context of what Richard Chase has called a "culture of contradictions."1 It may not be surprising, then, that traditional novelistic techniques are absent from the works of the eighteenth-century Charles Brockden Brown, whose works demonstrate the unreliability of the senses in providing knowledge. Such flouting of traditional techniques may be appropri­ ate in the American tradition. But it also seems surprisingly modern. Brown reveals the unreliability of the senses in a variety of ways: through the symbolic double, through multiple perspectives, through the narrative breaks and shifts in mode that occur at least twice in each of his four major novels, and, finally, through what can be called the contagious unreliability of parallel or juxtaposed scenes. I can illustrate all four methods by examining Edgar Huntly (1799), and then go on to examine other occurrences of the fourth, which has not previously been studied. The main way in which Edgar Huntly's reliability as character and narrator is impugned is through the use of the symbolic double, and there has been extensive discussion of this doubling.2 Clithero not only provides Hundy with the example of a person attempting to cope with his own irrational impulses but also furnishes a symbol, a double who reflects aspects of Huntly that Huntly is not consciously ready to admit.
    [Show full text]
  • Quaker Dream-Work in Charles Brockden Brown's
    “NOT SO MUCH WRITTEN AS DREAMED”: QUAKER DREAM-WORK IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S EDGAR HUNTLY Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this thesis is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This thesis does not include proprietary or classified information. ________________________________________ Jennifer Reid Certificate of Approval: _________________________ _________________________ Hilary E. Wyss James Emmett Ryan, Chair Associate Professor Associate Professor English English _________________________ _________________________ Cedrick May Stephen L. McFarland Assistant Professor Acting Dean English Graduate School “NOT SO MUCH WRITTEN AS DREAMED”: QUAKER DREAM-WORK IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S EDGAR HUNTLY Jennifer Reid A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of English Auburn, Alabama May 11th, 2006 “NOT SO MUCH WRITTEN AS DREAMED”: QUAKER DREAM-WORK IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S EDGAR HUNTLY Jennifer Reid Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this thesis at its discretion, upon request of individuals or institutions and at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. ______________________________ Signature of Author ______________________________ Date of Graduation iii TABLE OF CONTENTS “Not so much written as dreamed”: Quaker Dream-work in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly 1 Notes 40 References 47 iv THESIS ABSTRACT “NOT SO MUCH WRITTEN AS DREAMED”: QUAKER DREAM-WORK IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S EDGAR HUNTLY Jennifer Reid Master of English, May 11th, 2006 (B.S., University of Aberdeen, 2002) 58 Typed Pages Directed by James Emmett Ryan The religious element of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-walker (1799), and, specifically, the novel’s relationship with Quakerism, is often misunderstood, understated, or simply ignored by critics.
    [Show full text]
  • The Relations of Man with All That Surrounds Him
    THE MIDDLE PASSAGES OF ARTHUR MERVYN Liam Corley [A]ny text will the more inevitably take on the characteristics of a palimpsest the more openly it allows the voices of the dead to speak, thus—in a literary transcription of our cultural heritage—bringing about a consciousness of the presentness of the past. Claus Uhlig, “Literature as Textual Palingenesis: On Some Principles of Liter- ary History” The palimpsest—as both a literal agent of history that was appropriated by Western palaeographers from Eastern monasteries during the nineteenth cen- tury, and as metaphor—represents “history” not as natural evolution or pro- gress but as the history of colonial expansion, the violent erasure and superim- position of cultures, and defiant and subversive persistence. Sarah Dillon, “Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies” Charles Brockden Brown approached the art of writing with a feverish dedica- tion, restless intellect, and gothic imagination. Between 1798 and 1801, Brown wrote six novels, a book-length philosophical dialogue, and numerous shorter works. The gothic dramas of the four principal novels (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) are invested with philosophical and political sig- nificances that tantalize readers with suggestions of momentous implications without, in fact, becoming straightforward allegories or polemics. Brown’s novel-writing career occurred within the highly contentious political climate surrounding the final years of John Adams’s presidency. The hyperbolic rhetoric that seemingly charged all public speech in the era culminated in the 1798 pas- sage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a desperate attempt by the Federalists in Congress to control the circulation of conspiracy, critique, and accusation.
    [Show full text]
  • Historical Reading of Wieland Bill Christophersen
    picking up the knife a psycho- historical reading of wieland bill christophersen Literature . has a relationship to social and intellectual history, not as documentation, but as symbolic illumination.1 Edwin S. Fussell, in his essay "Wieland: A Literary and Historical Reading," goes far toward establishing a political/historical context for Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation (1798). He identifies the transformation oï patria that Brown and his generation had experienced as the real antecedent of the subtitle. Suggesting that, figuratively speaking, the newly nationalized writer of Brown's era was, like Carwin, a biloquist—a British "speaker" become American—and stressing the almost causal role writing had played in the American Revolution, Fussell sees this novel that pivots on biloquial voices and the writing act as embodying a revolutionary/postrevolutionary tension. With Clara Wieland as a "daughter of the American Revolution" in conflict with Carwin, an "American revolutionary and postrevolutionary writer," Carwin's destruction of the Wieland family becomes an image of Amer­ ica's revolutionary devastation—even as Brown's "horror and contempt" for the author's powers becomes a "product of postrevolutionary back­ lash." Fussell concludes by noting a paradox: "Writing is both the cause and the effect of action: . the American Revolution . , at least partly caused by writers, . necessitates an American literature to justify it and to ensure its fruits to posterity."2 0026-3079/86/2701-0115$01.50/0 15 Fussell, in highlighting a historical context for Brown's melodramatic plot, gives new resonance to Carwin and to several of the book's motifs.
    [Show full text]
  • The Location of the Reader in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly
    What Mary Knew: The Location of the Reader in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly Naoto Kojima 1. Between Gothic Romance and Sentimental Novel One of the distinctive characteristics of Charles Brockden Brown’s fourth novel Edgar Huntly is that there is almost no voice of women in Edgar’s memoir. In Wieland, Clara Wieland plays an important role as the narrator and the leading character of the horrific tale. Contrary to its title, Ormond in fact consists of a long letter concerning “the history of Constantia Dudley” (3), written by her closest friend Sophia Westwyn. Although Arthur Mervyn has male narrators and the male protagonist, Mervyn’s story is closely related to female characters such as Clemenza Lodi, Eliza Hadwin, and Achsa Fielding. In contrast to these novels, as Steven Watts points out, “Edgar Huntly betrayed virtually no sign of women.” He argues that “these fleeting, often distasteful female images in his last major novel implied that for Brown, the acute social tensions of liberalizing change were creating gender tensions as well” (120). Developing these gender issues in Edgar Huntly, Elizabeth Hinds states that “[f]or all intents and purposes, the women of Edgar’s tale have no more voice than the Indians, whose tongue Edgar knows but refuses to reproduce” (154). In other words, “Edgar Huntly’s geography is fundamentally a man’s world” (Barnard and Shapiro xxxiii). As scholars have called attention, Brown’s literary career has a crucial turning point after publishing Edgar Huntly. It is a move from early major gothic romances (Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly) to final two sentimental novels (Clara Howard and Jane Talbot) and then to journalism and cultural criticism during the 1800s.
    [Show full text]
  • Republican Virtue and the Spatial Topography of Charles Brockden Brown’S Arthur Mervyn
    The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002) Immersed in Palpable Darkness: Republican Virtue and the Spatial Topography of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn Masashi ORISHIMA I When Arthur Mervyn arrives in Philadelphia to “build a name and a fortune for [him]self,” he is thrilled at first with the scenery of the me- tropolis. Arriving from his rural home with only seventy-five cents in his pocket, Mervyn marvels at the largest city in post-revolutionary America, though it is only a two-day journey distant. For the first time in his life, Mervyn witnesses such wonders as “a triple row of lamps” that present “a spectacle enchanting and new”; Mervyn’s “personal cares” are “lost, for a time, in the tumultuous sensations.” However, the protagonist of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 is far less forthcoming in describing what he sees as he makes his way into the heart of the city. For all that Mervyn relates his “new delight and new wonder,” he scarcely notices the buildings that line the way to Front Street. It is as if Mervyn is walking along a narrow street with almost nothing on either side.1 The experience of a lonely walker traversing such a dark and narrow passage recurs throughout Brown’s works, for example, when Constantia Dudley in Ormond repeatedly tries to reach an only vaguely described destination in a plague-stricken Philadelphia, or when Clithero Copyright © 2002 Masashi Orishima. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes.
    [Show full text]
  • Asylums, Aliens, and Disabilities in Charles
    ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Sarah Eleonora Faye SPRING 2014 ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS A Thesis by Sarah Eleonora Faye Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet, Ph.D. __________________________________, Second Reader Jason Gieger, Ph.D. ____________________________ Date ii Student: Sarah Eleonora Faye I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Department Chair ___________________ David Toise, Ph,D. Date Department of English iii Abstract of ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS by Sarah Eleonora Faye This thesis focuses on Charles Brockden Brown’s ambiguous use of disabilities in an attempt to understand Brown’s stance on the Early Republic’s nativist debates. While Brown’s representations of disabilities mimic the tropes of nativist politico-medical rhetoric, they also push readers into identifying with flawed characters and questioning nativist intolerance. Brown debunks the simplistic worldview of the nativists, leading his readers into considering that they might already be degenerated physically and mentally, that we cannot separate ourselves from the Other, and that refusing to accept human imperfection means creating a society of unattainable norms. Thus, ambiguity is central to Brown’s work: he deconstructs all the binaries he sets up to give us a radical depiction of the Early Republic as complex, imperfect, and diverse.
    [Show full text]
  • The Family Gothic: Identity and Kinship in the American Gothic Tradition
    James Madison University JMU Scholarly Commons Senior Honors Projects, 2010-current Honors College Spring 2016 The family Gothic: Identity and kinship in the American Gothic tradition Meagan Elizabeth Riley James Madison University Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019 Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Riley, Meagan Elizabeth, "The family Gothic: Identity and kinship in the American Gothic tradition" (2016). Senior Honors Projects, 2010-current. 230. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019/230 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors College at JMU Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Honors Projects, 2010-current by an authorized administrator of JMU Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Family Gothic: Identity and Kinship in the American Gothic Tradition _______________________ An Honors Program Project Presented to the Faculty of the Undergraduate College of Arts and Letters James Madison University _______________________ by Meagan Elizabeth Riley May 2016 Accepted by the faculty of the Department of English, James Madison University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honors Program. FACULTY COMMITTEE: HONORS PROGRAM APPROVAL: Project Advisor: Brooks Hefner, Ph.D. Bradley R. Newcomer, Ph.D., Associate Professor, English Director, Honors Program Reader: Laura Henigman, Ph.D. Associate Professor, English Reader: Matthew Rebhorn, Ph.D. Associate Professor, English Acknowledgments I would first and foremost like to thank Dr. Brooks Hefner, who guided me through this academic process and volunteered his time and his thoughts to ensure I operated to the best of my ability with this project.
    [Show full text]
  • American Literature I, Lecture Eleven
    American Literature I Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly New York University Names and Terms Copyright Act of 1790 – first American copyright law; domestic only virtue / vir / virtus (Lat. for “courage”) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) Ann Radcliffe Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796) Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) Samuel Richardson, Pamela and Clarissa Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799, part I) Points to Remember Two possible critique of Enlightenment thought: 1) The Enlightenment overestimates the power of reason. What happens if reason is not all it is cracked up to be? Enlightenment thinkers underestimate the power of the irrational and the unconscious. This leads to: a) the Romantics’ valorization of the imagination as a higher faculty than reason. b) the Gothic exploration of criminality, madness, and the supernatural. 2) Enlightenment thought suggests that oppression and domination are residues of the feudal past and will eventually fade away. But what if Enlightenment thought does not have an incidental relationship to oppression and domination but rather depends on it? Think of the idea of negative liberty—freedom as freedom from oppression. Don’t you have to have thought of “oppression” first to think of freedom in this way. Is this notion of freedom thus conceptually dependent on a notion of oppression? With which of these critiques is the novel Edgar Huntly most concerned? Novel vs. Romance • Novel associated with women’s experience, seen as a form written primarily for women. • Famous novels named for their female protagonists: Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740–42); Richardson, Clarissa (1747–48); Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1791).
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Brockden Brown and the Ethics of the Grotesque
    CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN AND THE ETHICS OF THE GROTESQUE _______________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By William Douglas Joachim May, 2015 CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN AND THE ETHICS OF THE GROTESQUE _________________________ William Douglas Joachim APPROVED: _________________________ Roberta Weldon, Ph.D. Committee Chair _________________________ Jason Berger, Ph.D. _________________________ William Monroe, Ph.D. _________________________ Barry Wood, Ph.D. _________________________ Cynthia Freeland, Ph.D. University of Houston ________________________ Steven G. Craig, Ph.D. Interim Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Economics ii CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN AND THE ETHICS OF THE GROTESQUE _______________ An Abstract of a Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By William Douglas Joachim May, 2015 iii ABSTRACT This work focuses on tracing the animating ethos of Charles Brockden Brown’s intriguing but confusing novels through close attention to the texts and to the richly complex historical environment from which they emerge and to which they respond. In several non-novelistic writings, including prefaces, letters, essays, and reviews, Brown insists that the value of narratives, whether fictional or historical, lies in their effects in the realm of the ethical; it “lies without doubt in their moral tendency.” But Brown’s narratives go beyond inculcating a moral system; indeed, as I aim to show in my analyses of the novels Wieland and Ormond, each marked by Gothic sensationalism and psychological realism, Brown’s narratives function to challenge the ethics of ethics, to subject ideas to reality-grounded counterfactual scenarios so as to expose the humanity and justice or lack thereof of moral systems.
    [Show full text]
  • Transactional Bond in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown
    University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 1998 Transactional bond in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown Gretchen Elspeth DiGeronimo University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation DiGeronimo, Gretchen Elspeth, "Transactional bond in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown" (1998). Doctoral Dissertations. 2009. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2009 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps.
    [Show full text]
  • Stony Brook University
    SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Specters of Haiti: Race, Fear, and the American Gothic, 1789-1855 A Dissertation Presented By Gretchen Judith Woertendyke To The Graduate School In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English Stony Brook University August 2007 Copyright by Gretchen Judith Woertendyke 2007 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Gretchen Judith Woertendyke We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend Acceptance of this dissertation. Susan Scheckel—Dissertation Advisor Associate Professor of English Eric Haralson—Chairperson of Defense Associate Professor of English Helen Cooper Professor of English Robert S. Levine Professor of English, University of Maryland This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Lawrence Martin Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Specters of Haiti: Race, Fear, and the American Gothic, 1789-1855 By Gretchen Judith Woertendyke Doctor of Philosophy In English Stony Brook University 2007 This dissertation argues that the early American gothic is different from that of the British gothic and that the specter of slave violence in Saint-Domingue accounts for this difference. Unlike the British gothic, which overwrote a despotic, Catholic past onto a revolutionary, “terror”-filled present, American writers wrote a French and American Revolutionary present onto a future in which the worst fears of the early Republic were realized: French Revolutionary philosophy, itself related to the American Revolutionary experience, in the hands of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the slaves in Saint-Domingue.
    [Show full text]