This essay discusses Charles Brockden Brown's historical short stories. Although better known for his novels, Brown uses short pieces of fiction to create an early form of a metafictional impressionism. In doing so, Brown seeks to keep the associative freshness of his fiction by implication, using text that is not there. Critics have argued that Brown's narrators may end up in paranoid interpretations. The essay argues, however, that Brown's early short stories reveal stylistic and formal features that he developed in greater detail in historical tales like “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” (1800) and “Thessalonica: A Roman Story” (1799). Brown's Roman stories are complex textual games that are based upon a high degree of intertextuality and metafictional narrative devices. Brown's “unaccountable pleasure in dissecting” is therefore neither a narcissistic endeavor nor an intellectual fancy but a programmatic dimension of Brown's early short stories.
Re-Visioning the Past: Charles Brockden Brown's Historical Tales and the Pleasures of Dissecting
OLIVER SCHEIDING is the Professor of North American Literature and Early American Studies in the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on literary markets, magazine studies, and the American short story. He is the author of Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives before 1800 (Stanford University Press, 2015), which documents the traffic of short forms of narration in the early Americas. He also published the monograph The Early American Novel (Schöningh, 2003). He co-edited A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (Penn State University Press, 2013). He edited the journal Amerikastudien – American Studies on behalf of the German Association of American Studies (2011–2019). Currently, he is co-editing the Handbook of the American Short Story (De Gruyter Publishers, 2020) and is working on a manuscript tentatively entitled “The American Short Story in the 21st Century.”
Oliver Scheiding; Re-Visioning the Past: Charles Brockden Brown's Historical Tales and the Pleasures of Dissecting. Studies in the American Short Story 1 April 2020; 1 (1): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/studamershorstor.1.1.0001
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