Rating: 
Summary: What Lies Beneath
Review: First published in 1799, Charles Brockden Brown's novel, "Edgar Huntly" is an insane masterpiece. I love Brown. I read this novel for the first time a few years ago, and thought it was about time to refresh my memory. Set outside of Philadelphia in the final years of the 1780's, "Edgar Huntly," like other of Brown's works, test the new American republic's capacity to govern while balancing the needs and desires of its culturally disparate inhabitants. The novel is purportedly a correspondence from the protagonist, Edgar Huntly, to his friend/love interest, Mary Waldegrave, in the aftermath of her brother's death. Edgar is an educated, refined, enlightened young man, disconsolate upon the death of his friend. An avid walker, Edgar frequently leaves the environs of his hometown, Solebury, returning to the scene of his friend's death, a large elm tree. Near this tree late one evening, he spots a man, conspicuously lurking, burying something beneath the tree. Suspecting this man, Clithero, of Waldegrave's murder, Edgar begins a career of surveillance and tracking, following Clithero to his residence and through the uncharted wildernesses that border his hometown. What follows is Edgar's progress in discovering the truths behind the death of Waldegrave, the history of Clithero, and the foundations of his own self-control and rationality. Brown deals with a number of issues throughout the novel current to late 18th century America, including the dispossession of Native Americans from their land, Irish immigration, and the instability of a newly formed nation. Philosophically, Brown examines popular 18th century debates over the limits of sympathy, and the ability of sense, experiment, and observation to conclusively explain human nature. In his preface to the novel, Brown says that his novel will not exploit the then-common motifs of gothic fiction. Perhaps, but Brown, taking the example of William Godwin, moves the castles, dungeons, and murders of traditional gothic into the psyches of his characters. Dementia, paranoia, and in this novel, at least, the uncontrollability of sleep-walking, constitute the largely internal threats to personal and national safety. So join Edgar, Clithero, Sarsefield, the Lorimers, Inglefield, Queen Mab, and an army of hostile natives, on an intricate, often horrifying romp through late 18th century America. Brown's doubts and fears about living in the new nation will entrance and mortify you, and possibly make you consider putting yourself in restraints before you go to bed at night.
Rating:
Summary: What Lies Beneath
Review: First published in 1799, Charles Brockden Brown's novel, "Edgar Huntly" is an insane masterpiece. I love Brown. I read this novel for the first time a few years ago, and thought it was about time to refresh my memory. Set outside of Philadelphia in the final years of the 1780's, "Edgar Huntly," like other of Brown's works, test the new American republic's capacity to govern while balancing the needs and desires of its culturally disparate inhabitants. The novel is purportedly a correspondence from the protagonist, Edgar Huntly, to his friend/love interest, Mary Waldegrave, in the aftermath of her brother's death. Edgar is an educated, refined, enlightened young man, disconsolate upon the death of his friend. An avid walker, Edgar frequently leaves the environs of his hometown, Solebury, returning to the scene of his friend's death, a large elm tree. Near this tree late one evening, he spots a man, conspicuously lurking, burying something beneath the tree. Suspecting this man, Clithero, of Waldegrave's murder, Edgar begins a career of surveillance and tracking, following Clithero to his residence and through the uncharted wildernesses that border his hometown. What follows is Edgar's progress in discovering the truths behind the death of Waldegrave, the history of Clithero, and the foundations of his own self-control and rationality. Brown deals with a number of issues throughout the novel current to late 18th century America, including the dispossession of Native Americans from their land, Irish immigration, and the instability of a newly formed nation. Philosophically, Brown examines popular 18th century debates over the limits of sympathy, and the ability of sense, experiment, and observation to conclusively explain human nature. In his preface to the novel, Brown says that his novel will not exploit the then-common motifs of gothic fiction. Perhaps, but Brown, taking the example of William Godwin, moves the castles, dungeons, and murders of traditional gothic into the psyches of his characters. Dementia, paranoia, and in this novel, at least, the uncontrollability of sleep-walking, constitute the largely internal threats to personal and national safety. So join Edgar, Clithero, Sarsefield, the Lorimers, Inglefield, Queen Mab, and an army of hostile natives, on an intricate, often horrifying romp through late 18th century America. Brown's doubts and fears about living in the new nation will entrance and mortify you, and possibly make you consider putting yourself in restraints before you go to bed at night.
Rating:
Summary: What Lies Beneath
Review: First published in 1799, Charles Brockden Brown's novel, "Edgar Huntly" is an insane masterpiece. I love Brown. I read this novel for the first time a few years ago, and thought it was about time to refresh my memory. Set outside of Philadelphia in the final years of the 1780's, "Edgar Huntly," like other of Brown's works, test the new American republic's capacity to govern while balancing the needs and desires of its culturally disparate inhabitants. The novel is purportedly a correspondence from the protagonist, Edgar Huntly, to his friend/love interest, Mary Waldegrave, in the aftermath of her brother's death. Edgar is an educated, refined, enlightened young man, disconsolate upon the death of his friend. An avid walker, Edgar frequently leaves the environs of his hometown, Solebury, returning to the scene of his friend's death, a large elm tree. Near this tree late one evening, he spots a man, conspicuously lurking, burying something beneath the tree. Suspecting this man, Clithero, of Waldegrave's murder, Edgar begins a career of surveillance and tracking, following Clithero to his residence and through the uncharted wildernesses that border his hometown. What follows is Edgar's progress in discovering the truths behind the death of Waldegrave, the history of Clithero, and the foundations of his own self-control and rationality. Brown deals with a number of issues throughout the novel current to late 18th century America, including the dispossession of Native Americans from their land, Irish immigration, and the instability of a newly formed nation. Philosophically, Brown examines popular 18th century debates over the limits of sympathy, and the ability of sense, experiment, and observation to conclusively explain human nature. In his preface to the novel, Brown says that his novel will not exploit the then-common motifs of gothic fiction. Perhaps, but Brown, taking the example of William Godwin, moves the castles, dungeons, and murders of traditional gothic into the psyches of his characters. Dementia, paranoia, and in this novel, at least, the uncontrollability of sleep-walking, constitute the largely internal threats to personal and national safety. So join Edgar, Clithero, Sarsefield, the Lorimers, Inglefield, Queen Mab, and an army of hostile natives, on an intricate, often horrifying romp through late 18th century America. Brown's doubts and fears about living in the new nation will entrance and mortify you, and possibly make you consider putting yourself in restraints before you go to bed at night.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece From America's First Novelist
Review: I have read all of the books that Charles Brockden Brown had written in his short life (and, let me tell you, they are very hard to find) and this work is in my mind his best. Although at times his eighteenth century English gets in the way, this is a great book with an amazingly groundbreaking plot device, sleepwalking. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the formation of the American art of literature.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece From America's First Novelist
Review: I have read all of the books that Charles Brockden Brown had written in his short life (and, let me tell you, they are very hard to find) and this work is in my mind his best. Although at times his eighteenth century English gets in the way, this is a great book with an amazingly groundbreaking plot device, sleepwalking. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the formation of the American art of literature.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece From America's First Novelist
Review: I have read all of the books that Charles Brockden Brown hadwritten in his short life (and, let me tell you, they are very hard tofind) and this work is in my mind his best. Although at times his eighteenth century English gets in the way, this is a great book with an amazingly groundbreaking plot device, sleepwalking. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the formation of the American art of literature. By the way, I believe that Wilkie Collins stole from this book in his "Moonstone." END
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece From America's First Novelist
Review: I have read all of the books that Charles Brockden Brown hadwritten in his short life (and, let me tell you, they are very hard tofind) and this work is in my mind his best. Although at times his eighteenth century English gets in the way, this is a great book with an amazingly groundbreaking plot device, sleepwalking. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the formation of the American art of literature. By the way, I believe that Wilkie Collins stole from this book in his "Moonstone." END
Rating: 
Summary: Early American Romance
Review: Often ranked as "the first significant American novelist"-this is how Norman Grabo characterizes him in the Introduction to this volume-Charles Brockden Brown was an ambitious and inventive teller of tales, although an awkward literary craftsman. Brown was only in his twenties when he published this novel in 1799, but it was already his fourth book. Edgar Huntly, which takes place in rural Pennsylvania in 1787 recounts the strange adventures of a young man who sets out to discover the person responsible for killing his best friend, Waldegrave, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. His investigations put him on the track of Clithero, an Irish servant employed in his uncle's household, but one thing leads to another and Edgar finds himself having to fight Indians and face the perils of the wilderness in order to make his way back home. Most of the story is told by Edgar himself in a long letter-some twenty-seven chapters long-that he is in the process of writing to his intended, Waldegrave's sister, Mary.
Edgar Huntly belongs to the genre of romance, the much older but somewhat less respectable sibling of the novel of social realism that had come into vogue in the eighteenth century. The romance frequently has an exotic setting, and features incidents that stretch the limits of artistic plausibility, where it does not take a plunge into fantasy, as it does in Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk or Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Nevertheless, the genre enjoyed great popularity here down to the time of the Civil War, and Brown shows himself well acquainted with its conventions. He not only throws in a whole series of hair-raising encounters that pit the inexperienced Edgar with natural hazards, predatory wild animals, and marauding Delawares, but supplies a convoluted plot line that he further complicates with stories-within-the main story told by subordinate characters. Even for a romance, Edgar Huntly has an unusually tangled narrative web. It's hardly surprising the neophyte author himself sometimes has difficulty keeping track of the strands.
The reader making the acquaintance of Brown for the first time will not get any help from the note on the back cover supplied by Penguin, according to which "Edgar Huntly is the story of a young man who sleepwalks each night, a threat to himself and others, unable to control his baser passions....One of America's first Gothic novels...." I wonder whether the person responsible for these inane comments ever bothered to open the book. In the first place, Edgar Huntly is no Gothic novel. As E.F. Bleiler pointed out, it takes a castle to make a Gothic novel. But Brown explicitly distances himself from the suspicion of Gothicism in the remarkable address "To the Public" prefaced to the book, in which he prides himself on having found his materials in his native country and rejoices in not having fallen back on "Gothic castles and chimeras" in composing his work. But the statement about Edgar is not just inaccurate-it is blatantly incorrect. Edgar has at the most two sleepwalking episodes, one of which serves to initiate the most remarkable series of events in the novel, when he awakes to find himself mysteriously transported to a cave in the middle of the night. And nothing Edgar relates suggests he has a history of somnambulism in his past-nor that he is "unable to control his baser passions." In fact, the first sleepwalker to show up is the far more uncontrolled Clithero, who almost seems to have infected Edgar with his affliction.
Brown was clearly a pioneer of psychological analysis in the history of the novel. Like Edgar Allan Poe later, he probed the souls of his characters by plunging them into violent, imminently lethal situations. As a student of extreme states of the human psyche, he was not only a predecessor of Poe, but of Hawthorne and Melville as well. Yet Brown lacked the ability to apply his talent to the creation of highly individualized characters, one of the strengths of great nineteenth century novelists such as Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of the characters in Edgar Huntly, the protagonist included, remain little more than phantoms inhabiting a largely crepuscular world throughout the course of the action. However, like other trailblazing figures in the early history of American fiction-James Fenimore Cooper is a perfect example-Brown had an estimable ability to create atmosphere. It is not intended as a sarcasm to say that the reader may feel he or she is turning into a sleepwalker while reading Edgar Huntly.
Rating:
Summary: Early American Romance
Review: Often ranked as "the first significant American novelist"-this is how Norman Grabo characterizes him in the Introduction to this volume-Charles Brockden Brown was an ambitious and inventive teller of tales, although an awkward literary craftsman. Brown was only in his twenties when he published this novel in 1799, but it was already his fourth book. Edgar Huntly, which takes place in rural Pennsylvania in 1787 recounts the strange adventures of a young man who sets out to discover the person responsible for killing his best friend, Waldegrave, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. His investigations put him on the track of Clithero, an Irish servant employed in his uncle's household, but one thing leads to another and Edgar finds himself having to fight Indians and face the perils of the wilderness in order to make his way back home. Most of the story is told by Edgar himself in a long letter-some twenty-seven chapters long-that he is in the process of writing to his intended, Waldegrave's sister, Mary.
Edgar Huntly belongs to the genre of romance, the much older but somewhat less respectable sibling of the novel of social realism that had come into vogue in the eighteenth century. The romance frequently has an exotic setting, and features incidents that stretch the limits of artistic plausibility, where it does not take a plunge into fantasy, as it does in Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk or Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Nevertheless, the genre enjoyed great popularity here down to the time of the Civil War, and Brown shows himself well acquainted with its conventions. He not only throws in a whole series of hair-raising encounters that pit the inexperienced Edgar with natural hazards, predatory wild animals, and marauding Delawares, but supplies a convoluted plot line that he further complicates with stories-within-the main story told by subordinate characters. Even for a romance, Edgar Huntly has an unusually tangled narrative web. It's hardly surprising the neophyte author himself sometimes has difficulty keeping track of the strands.
The reader making the acquaintance of Brown for the first time will not get any help from the note on the back cover supplied by Penguin, according to which "Edgar Huntly is the story of a young man who sleepwalks each night, a threat to himself and others, unable to control his baser passions....One of America's first Gothic novels...." I wonder whether the person responsible for these inane comments ever bothered to open the book. In the first place, Edgar Huntly is no Gothic novel. As E.F. Bleiler pointed out, it takes a castle to make a Gothic novel. But Brown explicitly distances himself from the suspicion of Gothicism in the remarkable address "To the Public" prefaced to the book, in which he prides himself on having found his materials in his native country and rejoices in not having fallen back on "Gothic castles and chimeras" in composing his work. But the statement about Edgar is not just inaccurate-it is blatantly incorrect. Edgar has at the most two sleepwalking episodes, one of which serves to initiate the most remarkable series of events in the novel, when he awakes to find himself mysteriously transported to a cave in the middle of the night. And nothing Edgar relates suggests he has a history of somnambulism in his past-nor that he is "unable to control his baser passions." In fact, the first sleepwalker to show up is the far more uncontrolled Clithero, who almost seems to have infected Edgar with his affliction.
Brown was clearly a pioneer of psychological analysis in the history of the novel. Like Edgar Allan Poe later, he probed the souls of his characters by plunging them into violent, imminently lethal situations. As a student of extreme states of the human psyche, he was not only a predecessor of Poe, but of Hawthorne and Melville as well. Yet Brown lacked the ability to apply his talent to the creation of highly individualized characters, one of the strengths of great nineteenth century novelists such as Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. All of the characters in Edgar Huntly, the protagonist included, remain little more than phantoms inhabiting a largely crepuscular world throughout the course of the action. However, like other trailblazing figures in the early history of American fiction-James Fenimore Cooper is a perfect example-Brown had an estimable ability to create atmosphere. It is not intended as a sarcasm to say that the reader may feel he or she is turning into a sleepwalker while reading Edgar Huntly.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Interestingly Confusing
Review: This book (the cover amazon has displayed is *wrong*) is very interesting. It is also exceedingly strange. It was never boring, but it never made too much sense either. You think there might be supernatural elements involved -- but maybe not. It's a tale of the coming to America from England, the stuff that happens to the British here, and Indians. Cool, confusing, book.
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