Thesis(M.A.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references.

Recent decades have seen heightened interest in Charles Brockden Brown and his contribution to American literature. Scholars have worked to reclaim Brown from the margins of literary history, but he remains on the outskirts of literature classrooms and conversations. In an effort to further map Brown's influence and significance in the American literary tradition, I discuss his most famous novel, Wieland, in relation to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Brown has not previously been linked to James or The Turn of the Screw in any significant way, but the similarities between the texts provide plenty of room for discussion. I use current trends in adaptation theory to make the link from Wieland to The Turn of the Screw, with particular emphasis on issues of intertextuality in adaptation rather than fidelity to an origin text. I argue that adaptation study is a way of looking at texts rather than the examination of a certain kind of text. With this foundation, I assert that The Turn of the Screw functions as an adaptation of Wieland insofar as both explore reason, conflict, and psychological haunting in the context of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and late nineteenth-century almost-Modernist America. The juxtaposition of these texts allows for a new reading of The Turn of the Screw, one that explores the often discussed ambiguity and instability of the text as a symbolic critique of America and, more specifically, of democracy.

No description available.

The memoir as a specific and unique literary genre has only recently been broached for in-depth critical study, with two major, book-length examinations of the genre appearing in the past decade. While the genre has been around in various formats with various conventions for as long as humans have written, only the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century called for a more sophisticated look at the genre. This thesis will use these recent observations on the memoir as a genre to shed new light on two classics of gothic literature: Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and its serialized prequel “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” and James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

The purpose of this thesis is to show that Charles Brockden Brown was influenced by the American Revolution and the incidents that come after it. It is suggested that Brown created a gothic fiction that was intended to be a critique on the American Revolution by using murder narrratives present during the time to create his characters. Gothic fiction consists of many elements such as setting arechetypal characters, terror, emotion, psychological turmoil and language use.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

Cette étude propose de réviser le postulat selon lequel le roman américain ne naît que dans les années 1820, pour suggérer que cette forme émerge plus tôt, entre 1789 et 1819. La période qui suit la fin de la guerre d’Indépendance n’est pas favorable à la naissance du roman : les élites craignent alors la déchéance de la jeune République, et la fiction risque de faire basculer le pays dans l’anarchie. Les œuvres des premiers auteurs américains sont fortement façonnées par l’impératif de didactisme et d’utilité sociale et morale qui pèse alors sur la création littéraire. Toutefois, le roman qui émerge dans les années 1790 demeure une forme sombre, plurielle et paradoxale qui résiste à toute tentative de recadrage et de maîtrise, comme en témoigne particulièrement l’œuvre de Charles Brockden Brown. Alors qu’une première tradition littéraire a commencé à se mettre en place au tournant du siècle, le roman subit une transformation esthétique majeure au cours des années 1800 et 1810. Il dépeint à présent avec nostalgie, dans une forme lisse, mesurée et linéaire, une Amérique qui n’existe plus ou qui n’a jamais existé, dans laquelle tout est perpétuellement ordonné et transparent. Ces ouvrages ne marquent pourtant pas l’avènement du roman américain, car leur équilibre est artificiel et les éléments sombres sont toujours lisibles au cours de ces deux décennies. Nous concluons qu’un roman spécifiquement américain se développe effectivement entre 1789 et 1819, qui, au moyen de deux esthétiques opposées mais complémentaires, s’interroge sur l’individualité, le temps et l’écriture, dans une quête perpétuelle d’équilibre et de maîtrise qui ne se réalise jamais vraiment. / Although critics still widely consider the American novel only emerges in the 1820s, this dissertation invalidates this assertion and suggests that it rises between 1789 and 1819 and has specific aesthetic characteristics. The period that follows the close of the Revolution is not favorable to the development of the novel: the elites fear the fall of the early Republic, and the novel might precipitate the nation into anarchy. The first American authors’ works are fashioned by the social and moral imperatives that influence writing at that time. Despite these measures, the novels published in the 1790s are dark, fragmented and paradoxical and resist any attempt at order and control, as Charles Brockden Brown’s works show. While the 1790s seem to witness the development of a specifically American tradition, the novel undergoes a major aesthetic change at the beginning of the 19th century. Long fictions now depict, with nostalgia and in a smooth, balanced, strongly linear form, an ordered and transparent American nation that is no more or that never existed. Yet these works do not indicate that the American novel has reached its mature form, as their balance is purely artificial and unruly elements are still at work during those decades. We conclude that a specifically American novel emerges during the thirty years following the Revolution: under two different but complementary aesthetics, this genre questions matters linked to individuality, time and writing, and is haunted by a quest for control and balance that never really comes to completion.