Introduction: Reading Early America with Charles Brockden Brown

In the last twenty years, as the period we call the early American republic has gained prominence within the study of American literary history, Charles Brockden Brown's stock has risen among practitioners. More people, simply put, now read and work on Brown than ever before. The major novels are all readily available in classroom-oriented critical editions and the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition—an expansion on the Kent State University Press Bicentennial Edition of the 1970s and 1980s—continues to move toward production. ¹ The founding, in 2000, of the Charles Brockden Brown Society attracted members from multiple continents and paved the way for a series of biennial conferences in the United States and Europe. Several papers at the most recent conference, held in October 2008 at the Technische Universität in Dresden, Germany, moved beyond a focus on the relationship between nation and novel (a focus of much criticism in the 1990s) and explored instead Brown's engagement with globalizing political, economic, and information cultures via his interests in history, language, philosophy, and geography. Whereas a quarter century ago, in her influential 1985 book Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins could still treat Brown as a neglected author, some academics wandering the halls of early Americanist conferences these days can be overheard to complain that "Brown studies" has overtaken the field.

The upsurge of scholarly interest in Brown has several explanations. The historicist criticism that has dominated the field from the 1980s to the present set aside many of the aesthetic judgments that long made Brown suspect to New Critical formalists; and as the nationalism of cold war American studies criticism wanes, we no longer hear laments that Brown's indebtedness to European writers calls his Americanness into question. As more graduate students train to work on eighteenth-century American literature, Brown's canonicity becomes ever more secure; in search of fresh angles for their work, scholars have come to work on a broader range of his writing—and from more diverse approaches—than was the case a generation ago.

The essays collected in this issue of Early American Literature—each of which was submitted, reviewed, and accepted separately, without the design of a special issue in editors' minds—offer us insight into the range of uses to which Brown can be put in current scholarship and suggest as well some areas that may warrant further examination. In addition, the methodological approaches and assumptions represented here raise questions that will take early Americanists beyond a narrow focus on an individual author (we really should be suspicious of anything as limited as "Brown studies"!) and help us better conceptualize the relationship between literary and cultural histories in general. In the joint publication of these pieces we can see the possibilities and limitations in the range of approaches they represent.

The claim for Brown's centrality to the literary culture of post-Revolutionary America has, in recent criticism, been less grounded in assessments of the quality of his writing than in the quality and range of his engagements with early US culture—including sexuality, politics, nationalism, and race (Barnard, Kamrath, and Shapiro 2004). Yet much recent criticism divides into two camps: one that reads Brown's work symptomatically, looking for evidence of early America's political unconscious or Brown's own political partisanship (at times confusing the two); and another camp that, though it sometimes runs the risk of overdetermining Brown's political radicalism, reads him as a diagnostician of his culture more than a participant in its ideological or partisan conflicts. ² Despite their different approaches, both camps tend to take for granted that Brown's work adequately, deliberately, and often intelligently engages or represents a coherent early national culture. This marks a departure from older generations of critics—at least as far back as the Duyckinck brothers, but well into the twentieth century—who wanted to see Brown as a prototypical Romantic author and framed him as writing against his culture rather than typifying it. (Indeed, Brown may have been the first to understand himself in these terms.) If the move to...