Christophersen, Bill. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

In this book, Christophersen analyzes and contextualizes Brown's four Gothic novels in order to proove that Brown's title 'father of the American novel' is neither perfunctory nor questionable (x). By taking into account Brown's self-conscious nationalism along with his philosophical, moral, literary and psychological conerns, Christophersen uses a cultural-historical lens to examine the American character of Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.

The first of seven chapters highlights "key issues and events of the 1790s and [is] tailored to concerns Brown himself voiced about the Republic" (x). Chapter two delineates Brown's method and style. Each of the subsequent four address one novel in full. The last chapter examines why it would be so easy for Brown to "imagine the legacy of the Enlightenment and of America in such pessimistic terms" (166) as his books convey, why Brown would spearhead a Gothic counterpart that, "oblivious to morality, reason, laws, and social compacts, mocks the young citizen's modish pretensions even as it strikes him down" (178).

Entered by Elisa on 19 July 2004 at 1:13 AM.