| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. xxi, 249. $39.95.

This book is an inventive, often entertaining, and richly interdisciplinary investigation of how Charles Brockden Brown came to write gothic literature in an American context that, on the surface, would seem resistant to such strains. Peter Kafer interweaves biography, history, and literary readings to show that Brown's pioneering forays into gothicism stemmed from his informed sense that the nation's birth was attended by injustices and horrors, that the past could not easily be shaken off, and that the age of reason and enlightenment was haunted by irrationality in myriad forms. The first part of the book lays out historical and cultural contexts running from the 1650s to 1798—including the American Revolution, Quaker history, and transatlantic literary and philosophical trends—situating each with reference to Brown, his family, or his immediate communities. The second part builds on these backgrounds to explicate Brown's major works: Wieland, "Carwin," Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly, all written or published in a fury of productivity between 1798 and 1800.

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