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).

Poems,volume 7 of the series, is the first comprehensive collection of the poetry of Charles Brockden Brown (1771– 1810), one of the earliest professional writers in U.S. history. While Brown is well known as a novelist, his poetry has never before been collected, and many of the works included in this book appear in print for the first time in 200 years. The Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association has awarded the volume a seal of certification as an MLA Approved Scholarly Edition. Each edited text has a detailed textual note providing publication history, provenance, and information on attribution, along with extensive scholarly annotations. A historical introduction locates the poems in Brown’s biography, the print culture of the Revolutionary Atlantic world, and the literary history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while a textual essay provides full bibliographical information on the sources for all copy-texts, as well as an extensive description of the editorial protocols. The volume therefore promises to reshape our understanding of professional literary writing in the period after the American Revolution.