Romance of Real Life

Among the leading writers of the early republic, Charles Brockden Brown often appears as a romantic prototype - the brilliant, alienated author rejected by a utilitarian, materialistic American society. In "The Romance of Real Life", Steven Watts reinterprets Brown's life and work as a case study in the emerging culture of capitalism at the dawn of the 19th century. Offering a revisionist view of Brown himself, Watts examines the major novels of the 1790s, as well as previously neglected sources - from early essays and private letters to later career forays into journalism, political pamphleteering, serial fiction and cultural criticism. The result is a picture of Brown as a man of letters in post-Revolutionary America, a man who analyzed the public and private vagaries of individual agency. His notoriously volatile private life, it is suggested, in many ways flowed from a critique of market society and its impulses. Watts also aims to show how Brown's experience was central to broader developments: the rise of the novel in America, the development of gender and family formulations, the clash between republican "virtue" and liberal "self-interest," and the origins of a bourgeois creed of self-control. Perhaps most importantly, he explains how Brown helped articulate a notion of "culture" itself as a civilizing force to restrain restless liberal individualism.