Un-Noveling Brown: Liberalism and Its Literary Discontents

• Published in: Early American literature 2022-03, Vol.57 (2), p.549-554
• Main Authors: Barnard, Philip, Shapiro, Stephen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; American literature; Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810); Centrism; Cultural identity; Culture; Genre; Liberalism; Literary devices; Literary studies; Literary translation; Native peoples; Novels; Radical groups; Radicalism; Sovereignty; Wallerstein, Immanuel (1930-2019)
• ISSN: 0012-8163; 1534-147X; 1534-147X
• DOI: 10.1353/eal.2022.0041

Starting from Immanuel Wallerstein's argument that that twentieth-century and contemporary disciplinary formations are part of the cultural system of centrist liberalism, which emerged in nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the revolutionary age, to anchor the postrevolutionary ideological conservatism-liberalismsocialism triad in which we still live today, the essay argues that the basic categories of early American literary studies, like those of literary studies generally, are fundamentally liberal in nature and thus poorly suited to providing insights into a period when liberalism was not yet established as an overarching framework for cultural production and understanding. Because "the novel" should thus be understood as a major category and set of assumptions within the historical culture of liberalism, its disciplinary centrality has obscured our understanding of the early modern and revolutionary periods and produced anachronistic perspectives. One important potential of the ongoing edition of Charles Brockden Brown's "uncollected" or non-novelistic writings is to remind us that Brown's and other writings of the period were produced in an era when the assumptions of centrist liberalism were not yet in place. The edition makes it possible not only to un-novelize Brown and read this author outside long-held assumptions about the genre--in keeping with Brown's own alternative theory of "romance," which registered his dissonant relation to the emerging "novel" form--but also encourages us to approach the entire period, and its discourses of identity, power, and culture, outside this set of assumptions.