Charles Brockden Brown: Literary Essays and Reviews

This edition is the third in a projected series of critical and annotated editions of the writings by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) not contained in the Bicentennial Edition of hisNovels and Related Works. It aims at widening the bibliographical and textual basis for the study of Brown's works. On the basis of an «Annotated Bibliography», which discusses in detail all former and many new attributions of his mostly anonymous contributions to periodicals, it offers for the first time a critical text of fifty-seven «Selected Literary Essays and Reviews». It shows that Brown, well known for his novels and short stories, also published a great number of articles on literary works and topics and became, about three decades before Poe, the first literary critic of note in the United States. Two indexes, of authors and key terms, help to explore a dimension of Brown's writings new to most students of American literature.