The Romance of Real Life Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture / Steven Watts.
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TextDescription: 1 online resource (1 online resource xviii, 246 pages)ISBN: 9781421436043Subject(s): 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 | Authorship -- History -- 18th century | Novelists, American -- 18th century -- Biography | National characteristics, American, in literature | Authors and readers -- United States -- History -- 18th century | United States | United States -- Civilization -- 1783-1865 | 1700-1865 | United States | English fictionGenre/Form: History. | Biographies. | Electronic books. | Electronic books. Additional physical formats: Print version:: Romance of real life.DDC classification: B | 813/.2 LOC classification: PS1136 | .W35 1994Online resources: Full text available: | Item type | Current library | Call number | URL | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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eBook
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Digital Library
Resources in this library are accessible in digital format e.g. eBooks or eJournals accessible online. |
PS1136 .W35 1994 (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
Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-241) and index.
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.
Open Access Unrestricted online access star
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.
Description based on print version record.
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