- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Early Years, 1771–1795
- Later Years, 1795–1810
- <i>Wieland</i>; or, The Transformation of American Literary History
- <i>Ormond; or, The Secret Witness</i>
- <i>Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793</i>
- On Felons and Fallacies: <i>Edgar Huntly</i>
- <i>Stephen Calvert</i>’s Unfinished Business
- <i>Clara Howard</i>: <i>in a Series of Letters</i>
- <i>Jane Talbot, a Novel</i>
- History, Romance, and the Novel
- <i>Historical Sketches</i>
- Political Pamphlets
- “Annals of Europe and America” and Brown’s Contribution to Early American Periodicals
- Letters
- Poetry
- Short Fiction
- Brown and the Woldwinites
- Brown and Women’s Rights
- Slavery, Abolition, and African Americans in Brown
- Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker Milieu
- Brown, the Illuminati, and the Public Sphere
- Brown, Empire, and Colonialism
- Brown and Physiology
- Brown and the Yellow Fever
- Brown and Sex
- Brown’s American Gothic
- Brown, Sensibility, and Sentimentalism
- Brown and the Novel in the Atlantic World
- Brown and Classicism
- Brown’s Studies in Literary Geography
- Brown, the Visual Arts, and Architecture
- Brown’s Literary Afterlife
- Brown’s Early Biographers and Reception, 1815–1940s
- Brown’s Later Biographers and Reception, 1949–2000s
- Brown Studies Now and in Transition
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter discusses Charles Brockden Brown’s literary investment in physiology, medicine, and disease as a crucial knowledge base for his Gothic fictions. The instances of somnambulism, spontaneous combustion, ventriloqual psychosis, and yellow fever that populate Brown’s fictions are the signature pathological and quasi-pathological conditions that mark its inherently para-physiological literary terrain. Situated as cultural pathologies and quasi-clinical conditions, these diseases or diseaselike conditions function as triggers for his plots and as engines of sociocultural critique. This chapter traces Brown’s intellectual investments in medical knowledge as part of the shared border between the mental/moral and the bodily/natural and how these investments led him to situate his fiction in the interstices between the social, medical, and mental and the categories of knowledge that regulate understanding of these domains.
Keywords: Charles Brockden Brown, physiology, Erasmus Darwin, Elihu Hubbard Smith, Benjamin Rush, somnambulism, spontaneous combustion, yellow fever, mania mutabilis, Gothic novel
Stephen Rachman is Associate Professor in the Department of English, former director of the American Studies Program, and codirector of the Digital Humanities Literary Cognition Laboratory at Michigan State University. He is the editor of The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow. He is a coauthor of the award-winning Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow and coeditor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. He has written numerous articles on Poe, literature and medicine, cities, popular culture, and an award-winning website on Sunday-school books for the Library of Congress American Memory Project. He is a past president of the Poe Studies Association and is currently completing a study of Poe titled “The Jingle Man: Edgar Allan Poe and the Problems of Culture.”
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- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Early Years, 1771–1795
- Later Years, 1795–1810
- <i>Wieland</i>; or, The Transformation of American Literary History
- <i>Ormond; or, The Secret Witness</i>
- <i>Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793</i>
- On Felons and Fallacies: <i>Edgar Huntly</i>
- <i>Stephen Calvert</i>’s Unfinished Business
- <i>Clara Howard</i>: <i>in a Series of Letters</i>
- <i>Jane Talbot, a Novel</i>
- History, Romance, and the Novel
- <i>Historical Sketches</i>
- Political Pamphlets
- “Annals of Europe and America” and Brown’s Contribution to Early American Periodicals
- Letters
- Poetry
- Short Fiction
- Brown and the Woldwinites
- Brown and Women’s Rights
- Slavery, Abolition, and African Americans in Brown
- Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker Milieu
- Brown, the Illuminati, and the Public Sphere
- Brown, Empire, and Colonialism
- Brown and Physiology
- Brown and the Yellow Fever
- Brown and Sex
- Brown’s American Gothic
- Brown, Sensibility, and Sentimentalism
- Brown and the Novel in the Atlantic World
- Brown and Classicism
- Brown’s Studies in Literary Geography
- Brown, the Visual Arts, and Architecture
- Brown’s Literary Afterlife
- Brown’s Early Biographers and Reception, 1815–1940s
- Brown’s Later Biographers and Reception, 1949–2000s
- Brown Studies Now and in Transition
- Index
