Charles Brockden Brown - Reception History and Critical Reputation

Reception History and Critical Reputation

Although Brown's writings did not achieve immediate commercial success, he was republished in both the U.S. and England throughout the romantic era and developed a widespread and influential reputation as a "writer's writer." New editions of his works were published and reviewed widely in North America and England during the 1820s, for example, when Brown's novels were also published in combined editions with those of Schiller and Mary Shelley. His novels were the first U.S. novels translated into other European languages: Ormond was published in German (where it was attributed to Godwin) during 1803, and a French version of Wieland appeared in 1808. An abridged version of William Dunlap's posthumous 1815 biography of him was also reprinted in England in 1822. The most important group of writers influenced by Brown during this period was the Godwin-Shelley circle mentioned above, but Brown was read and recommended by many other major British writers of this era, notably William Hazlitt, Thomas Love Peacock, John Keats, and Walter Scott. Among US writers, Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier were notable in regarding Brown as a particularly influential and significant predecessor. Philadelphia novelist and journalist George Lippard included a dedication to Brown in his 1845 bestseller The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall.

Brown was less widely read at the end of the 19th century, when prevailing Realist and Naturalist literary styles obscured most fiction of Brown's era. Literary-critical scholarship revived interest when American Studies scholars like Vernon Louis Parrington and Fred Lewis Pattee examined his works in the 1920s and subsequent decades. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, scholarly biographies and monographs began to appear on Brown. Major scholars such as Leslie Fiedler, who discussed Brown in his landmark study Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), helped repopularize his work, although scholarly emphasis in the mid and late 20th century emphasized Brown's novels, largely ignoring his voluminous periodical writings, pamphlets, and historical narratives.

The contemporary era of interest in Brown begins with the publication of a modern scholarly edition of Brown's novels, the six-volume Kent State "Bicentennial Edition" that was organized by Sidney J. Krause and S.W. Reid and appeared from 1977 to 1987. During the same period, new but still incomplete attempts to publish a selection of non-novelistic writings were initiated by German scholar Alfred Weber. Since the 1980s, new scholarship on both Brown and the early national period, accompanied by new mass market editions of Brown's novels and increasing efforts to understand Brown's entire career, has transformed the understanding of Brown's writing and its place in US cultural history. Brown was regarded as a somewhat secondary novelist by scholars in the cold war era who focused on normative aesthetic criteria and tended to ignore the wide scope of his writings, and their referential impact, but more recent and historically-oriented scholarship has established Brown as a leading writer and intellectual of the late enlightenment and early republic. At the beginning of the 21st century, Brown is widely acknowledged as a key figure in US literary history whose writings provide insight into the major ideological, intellectual, and artistic struggles and transformations of the Atlantic revolutionary era, even if not as aesthetically rewarding as core works of the traditional American literary canon. A Charles Brockden Brown Society, founded in 2000, has regular conferences on the work of Brown and his contemporaries.

In 2009 The Library of America selected Brown’s short story "Somnambulism: A Fragment" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub. The Library also publishes Wieland, Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly as "Three Gothic Novels" in a separate volume, edited by Sydney J. Krause. The Library also included Brown's poem, Monody, On the death of Gen. George Washington, in its volume of American poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.