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The Project History of the Edition Our project builds on the steady and now explosive growth of interest in Charles Brockden Brown in North American and European scholarship since World War II, which has securely established his reputation as the first important American novelist. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, such scholars as Harry Levin, Warner Berthoff, Leslie Fiedler, and Donald Ringe directed attention to his work, a trickle of dissertations and articles turned into a stream, and by the time ground-breaking monographs (Norman Grabo's The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown, 1981), collections (Bernard Rosenthal's Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, 1981), and reference works (Patricia Parker's Charles Brockden Brown: A Reference Guide, 1980) appeared, Brown's place in the canon of the American novel, never in question in the 19th century, was re-affirmed for the 20th. The publication of the Bicentennial Edition inspired several new waves of Brown criticism in the United States and abroad. In addition to hundreds of journal articles, this includes monographs about Brown by Axelrod (1982), Ringe (1966, rev. ed. 1991), Schäfer (1991), Christopherson (1993), Mertz, Watts (1994), Hinds (1997), and Glasenapp (1999), as well as many books in which large sections or substantial chapters are dedicated to Brown: Ringe (1982), Fleischmann (1983), Ferguson (1984), Tompkins (1985), Davidson (1986), Bennett (1987), Jordan, Levine (1989), Dauber, Limon, Warner (1990), Herdman, Ziff (1991), Bradfield, Kindermann (1993), Looby, Reising, Samuels (1996), Barnes (1997), Burgett, Ruttenberg, Stern (1998), Crain (2001), Barnard, et al., Cody, Kafer, Slawinski (2004) and Strode (2005). In addition, Brown began to receive increased attention in histories of American literature, such as Elliott's Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), and Bercovitch's Cambridge History of American Literature (1994-). A constantly updated bibliography of secondary literature on Brown is posted in this website. Two important dimensions of our present project—identifying the larger Brown canon and drawing attention to Brown's brilliant work beyond the novels—were already emerging in the1960s. Building on the work of Charles E. Bennett and Daniel Edwards Kennedy, Alfred Weber began todraw attention to some of Brown's uncollected works. Early publications in the 1960s and 1970s were followed by Weber's critical edition of Somnambulism and Other Stories (1987) and (co-edited with Wolfgang Schäfer, and with the collaboration of John Holmes) of Brown's Literary Essays and Reviews (1992). John Holmes, in collaboration with Edwin Saeger and Alfred Weber, has been gathering, attributing, and editing Brown's letters for publication since 1986. Our present project not only builds on, revises, and completes these efforts, but it also opens up a vast new horizon of additional writings known or suspected to be by Brown. |
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