The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown ed. by Philip Barnard, Hilary Emmett, and Stephen Shapiro (review)

Twenty years ago the Charles Brockden Brown Society (CBBS) was founded “to stimulate interest in the life and writings of Charles Brock-den Brown (1770–1810) as well as other writers from this period and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information among Brown scholars and other interested persons” (CBBS website). Since its inception the members of the society have developed (among other things) the Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition and have published newly annotated editions of Brown’s principal literary works, as well as monographs and collections of essays on Brown and his circum-Atlantic world. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown stands as the society’s crowning achievement to date. It is a tribute to the ideals of collaborative international scholarship and, in these increasingly digital times, underscores the worth of real-life productive debate within an international conference setting.

At around $120 (£80 in the UK; €130 in the Netherlands) and nearly six hundred pages, the hardback edition of The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown is not so much a classroom textbook as a perfect university library resource that offers students and professional scholars alike accessible, scholarly discussion and analysis of all aspects of this major early American author’s life and work. It features a comprehensive critical overview of the extant scholarship, presents readers with important historical contexts, and contains clear signposts to new critical routes for the adventurous academic traveler to follow. Barnard, Emmett, and Shapiro have produced a wonderful addition to the Oxford Handbook series that does exactly what such a handbook should do. When read from cover to cover, it also contains a clear thesis arguing for the relevance of Brown’s writings to contemporary American and wider circum-Atlantic culture and society.

The handbook is divided into eight parts, each of which contains multiple essays, thirty-five in total (excluding the introduction). While each section stands on its own and is clearly titled to highlight the content of the essays, the sections also complement each other. Readers will be richly rewarded by studying part 5, “Politics and the World System,” immediately following part 1, “Biography.” Together these parts make up a detailed portrait of the writer in his world, so to speak, with cogent discussions of the intellectual, political, and religious contexts in which the young author’s mind developed. Similarly, part 2, “Romances,” is complemented by part 4, “Writings in Other Genres,” and part 7, “Literary Forms, Aesthetics, and Culture.” Together these sections offer an exhaustive study of the development of Brown’s literary techniques, thematic preoccupations, and ideas on the potential agency of fiction. Part 3, “The History-Fiction Nexus,” and part 6, “The Body and Medical Knowledge,” explore the territories of early American scientific and philosophical discourse, revealing that Brown was not just a novelist but a public intellectual engaging in critical debate on complex aesthetic, social, political, and scientific problems in his era.

The reader of the complete handbook will learn that the multifaceted nature of Brown’s professional writing career stems from his familial origins and the tumultuous era in which he grew up. In the opening biographical section, Lisa West explains how the original “inner light” concept of the Quaker community of the seventeenth century “must have seemed positively anarchical to their contemporaries” (8). In an essay further exploring the Quaker milieu, Robert Battistini explains that “Quaker allegiance was to a universal realm of religious practice, and thus they would not swear allegiance to a political state” (319). As such, Brown’s mind was from the outset one that looked at America, if not from the margins, at least from a position outside the ideological mainstream.

The handbook further details how the young Brown joined both a legal and a literary society (13) and was influenced by and seriously discussed the fiction and politics of “Woldwinite” (181) writers such...