Watts, Steven,  1952- <br/><br/>
The Romance of Real Life  Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture / 
Steven Watts. 
 - 1 online resource (1 online resource xviii, 246 pages) 
 - Book collections on Project MUSE. .
<br/><br/> 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 
<br/><br/>Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-241) and index. 
<br/><br/>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. 
<br/><br/> Open Access 
<br/><br/> 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. 
<br/><br/><label>ISBN: </label>9781421436043 
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Personal Names: </label><br/>Brown, Charles Brockden.<br/>Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810. <br/>Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810. 
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Chronological Terms: </label><br/>1700-1865 
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Topical Terms: </label><br/>Cultuur.<br/>Romanticism.<br/>Novelists, American.<br/>National characteristics, American, in literature.<br/>Civilization.<br/>Authorship.<br/>Authors and readers.<br/>Romanticism--United States.<br/>Authorship--History--18th century.<br/>Novelists, American--18th century--Biography.<br/>National characteristics, American, in literature.<br/>Authors and readers--History--United States--18th century.
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Geographic Terms: </label><br/>United States.<br/>United States--Civilization--1783-1865.
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Index Terms: </label>United States English fiction 
<br/><br/><label>Index Terms--Genre/Form: </label><br/>History.<br/>Biographies.<br/>Electronic books.<br/>Electronic books. 
<br/><br/><label>LC Class. No.: </label>PS1136  / .W35 1994 
<br/><br/><label>Dewey Class. No.: </label>B 813/.2