Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown

Abstract

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was a key writer of the revolutionary era and early U.S. republic, known for his landmark novels and other writings in a variety of genres. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents all of Brown’s non-novelistic writings—letters, political pamphlets, fictions, periodical writings, historical writings, and poety—in a seven-volume scholarly set. This series’ volumes are edited to the highest scholarly standards and will bear the seal of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions (MLA-CSE).

Political Pamphlets,volume 4 of the series, brings together, for the first time, the three political pamphlets and related writings of Charles Brockden Brown. While Brown is well known as a novelist and editor, his pamphlets addressing the Louisiana Question and Jefferson's Embargo are here presented and contextualized in terms of the period's geopolitical developments and the newspaper polemics that were their immediate context. Each edited text provides detailed information concerning publication history, provenance, and attribution, along with extensive scholarly annotation. A Historical Essay locates the pamphlets in the wider contexts of Brown’s literary career, the print culture of the Revolutionary Atlantic world, and the literary history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while a Textual Essay provides full bibliographical information on the sources for all copy-texts, as well as extensive description of the editorial protocols. The volume substantially reshapes our understanding of Brown's corpus and development, and provides insights into the relations of literary, journalistic, and political writing during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. The Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association has awarded the volume a seal of certification as an MLA Approved Scholarly Edition.