The Romance of Real Life Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture / Steven Watts. [print]
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Item type | Current library | Call number | URL | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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G Allen Fleece Library Online | PS1136.W388 2019 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Link to resource | Available | ||
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G Allen Fleece Library Online | PS1136.W388 2019 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Link to resource | Available | ||
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G Allen Fleece Library Online | PS1136.W388 2019 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Link to resource | Available |
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
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.
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.
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