The romance of real life : Charles Brockden Brown and the origins of American culture
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Bibliographic Information
The romance of real life : Charles Brockden Brown and the origins of American culture
Johns Hopkins University Press, c1994
Available at 26 libraries
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Note
"Bibliographic essay": p. 225-241
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 case study in the emerging culture of capitalism at the dawn of the 19th 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 later career forays into journalism, political pamphleteering, serial fiction and cultural criticism. The result is a picture of Brown as a man of letters in post-Revolutionary America, a man who analyzed the public and private vagaries of individual agency. His notoriously volatile private life, it is suggested, in many ways flowed from a critique of market society and its impulses.
Watts also aims to show 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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Novel and the Market in the Early Republic
Chapter 2. The Lawyer and the Rhapsodist
Chapter 3. The Young Artist as Social Visionary
Chapter 4. The Major Novels (I): Fiction and Fragmentation
Chapter 5. The Major Novels (II): Deception and Disintegration
Chapter 6. The Writer as Bourgeois Moralist
Chapter 7. The Writer and the Liberal Ego
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index
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