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BestsellerE-book
Author Watts, Steven, 1952-

Title The Romance of Real Life Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture / Steven Watts.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (1 online resource xviii, 246 pages)
text file
Series Book collections on Project MUSE.
Note Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.
The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-241) and index.
Contents 1. The Novel and the Market in the Early Republic -- 2. The Lawyer and the Rhapsodist -- 3. The Young Artist as Social Visionary -- 4. The Major Novels (I): Fiction and Fragmentation -- 5. The Major Novels (II): Deception and Disintegration -- 6. The Writer as Bourgeois Moralist -- 7. The Writer and the Liberal Ego.
Access Open Access Unrestricted online access
Summary The Romance of Real Life shows how a sensitive, prolific writer confronted, wrestled with, and ultimately promoted the emergence of a liberal society in nineteenth-century America.
Watts also shows 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.
His notoriously volatile private life, it turns out, in many ways flowed from a critique of market society and its impulses.
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 late-career forays into journalism, political pamphleteering, serial fiction, and cultural criticism. The result is a fuller picture of Brown as a man of letters in post-Revolutionary America, a man who rigorously analyzed the public and private vagaries of individual agency.
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 complex case study in the emerging culture of capitalism at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Local Note Project Muse Project Muse Open Access
Subject Brown, Charles Brockden.
Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810.
Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810.
Cultuur.
Romanticism.
Novelists, American.
National characteristics, American, in literature.
Civilization.
Authorship.
Authors and readers.
Romanticism -- United States.
United States.
Authorship -- History -- 18th century.
History.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject Novelists, American -- 18th century -- Biography.
Genre/Form Biographies.
Subject National characteristics, American, in literature.
Authors and readers -- United States -- History -- 18th century.
United States -- Civilization -- 1783-1865.
Chronological Term 1783-1865
1700-1865
Indexed Term United States
English fiction
Genre/Form History.
Electronic books.
Electronic books. .
Biographies.
Added Author Project Muse.
Project Muse, distributor.
Other Form: Print version: Watts, Steven, 1952- Romance of real life. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 (DLC) 93011601 (OCoLC)28498476
ISBN 9781421436043
1421436043
9781421436036