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Chargement... Charles Brockden Brown : Three Gothic Novels : Wieland / Arthur Mervyn / Edgar Huntly (Library of America)par Charles Brockden Brown
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Appartient à la série éditorialeLibrary of America (103)
Haunted, dreamlike scenes define the fictional world of Charles Brockden Brown, America's first professional novelist. Published in the final years of the 18th century, Brown's startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual resume of themes that would constantly recur in American literature: madness and murder, suicide and religious obsession, the seduction of innocence and the dangers of wilderness and settlement alike. In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown's works. Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, is often considered his masterpiece. A relentlessly dark exploration of guilt, deception, and compulsion, it creates a sustained mood of irrational terror in the midst of the Pennsylvania countryside. In Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Brown draws on his own experiences to create indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, while telling the story of a young man caught in the snares of a professional swindler. Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American wilderness in a series of eerily unreal adventures that test the limits of the protagonist's self-knowledge. All three novels reveal Brown as the pioneer of a major vein of American writing, a novelist whose literary progeny encompasses Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and the whole tradition of horror and noir from Cornell Woolrich to Stephen King. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.2Literature English (North America) American fiction Post-Revolutionary 1776-1830Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.5)
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Arthur Mervyn is definitely the weakest offering in this collection of three novels. Overlong and full of the most outrageous and unlikely coincidences. Reads like a crappy Dickens novel. Mervyn is the most unbelievably good and honest person ever fictionalized. He spend pages justifying the most outrageous behavior, like aiding a murderer, to convince the reader of his above board motives.
Everyone lives happily ever after, except for the scores that committed suicide, or were murdered, or died in prison, or died of yellow fever.
Edgar Huntly is not a bad novel but it can't decide what it wants to be. It starts out as a pretty compelling mystery, but mid-book turns into a story about the Indian Wars. There is a minor sleep walking theme throughout the book, but this isn't obvious until the very end. Once again the novel is littered with the most unlikely coincidences. I think I read that Brown wrote this in two parts at different times so that partly accounts for the shift in theme. A decent read and not overly long.
I would only recommend Wieland. This can be found in the public domain, so there is no need to shell out $25 for this novel if you don't mind an ebook copy.. (