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The "novel" historicism of Charles Brockden Brown
Abstract
This study centers on Brown's theory and practice of history writing as it evolved in his "Annals of Europe and America" in the American Register (1807-09). Using a new historicist approach and various post-structural techniques appropriate to his developing historicism, I suggest that Brown's historical narrative is not "hackwork" but a protomodern response to consensus historiography and the cultural politics of the early national period. In Part One of my study, I re-assess Brown's theory of history in the context European, colonial, and early national traditions of history writing. Tracing his understanding of history in his earlier reviews, essays, and fictitious histories, I argue that his dialectical inquiry into rationalist and romantic approaches to history and his desire for an American historian of the first rank prompted him to historicize the recent past. Chapters in Part Two focus not only on the material "business of the historian" but on Brown's role as a subject--as a mirror of cultural tensions. Beyond identifying the commercial influences on Brown and his resistance to a filiopietistic tradition of historiography, I use narrative discourse and postcolonial theories to analyze how his narrative interogates turn-of-the-century empire-building. Brown, I suggest, not only scrutinizes European colonialism and its oppressive political and ideological practices but also articulates an increasingly ironic view of American exceptionalism--of the imperialist dimensions of republicanism. Finally, Part Three examines Brown's concerns about the viability of democratic processes in the early republic and his critical response to the controversial Republican caucus of 1808. By juxtaposing public documents for his readers in mutually revealing ways, Brown's "dialogical history" comes to resemble the kind of anti-progressive or subversive history Foucault identifies with Nietzsche and other historians of a more radical or modern tradition. Brown's historicism becomes "novel" or new in the context of colonial and nineteenth-century historiography, and necessarily revises traditional views of his own latent orthodoxy and conservativism. It not only sheds light on attitudes in his day toward historical discourse and documents but complicates our understanding of historicism--old and new--in ours.
Subject Area
American studies|American history|American literature
Recommended Citation
Kamrath, Mark Lloyd, "The "novel" historicism of Charles Brockden Brown" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9623626.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9623626