TY - BOOK AU - Watts,Steven ED - Project Muse. ED - Project Muse. TI - The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture SN - 9781421436043 AV - PS1136 .W35 1994 U1 - B 20 KW - Brown, Charles Brockden. KW - Brown, Charles Brockden, KW - Cultuur KW - gtt KW - Romanticism KW - fast KW - Novelists, American KW - National characteristics, American, in literature KW - Civilization KW - Authorship KW - Authors and readers KW - United States KW - History KW - 18th century KW - Biography KW - 1783-1865 KW - English fiction KW - Biographies KW - Electronic books KW - lcgft KW - Electronic books. KW - local N1 - 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 N2 - 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 UR - https://muse.jhu.edu/book/70842/ ER -