Description: AMERICAN PROTEUS seeks to explain what it means for Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) to have created out of his life-experiences and encompassing cultural milieu a novel kind of fiction for a new kind of country. As a work of biographical criticism, this study charts the emergence of Brown's authorial voice as it developed throughout an amorphous, multifaceted, and conflicted apprenticeship. This eleven-year period of literary experimentation established the foundation for his brief yet momentous career as a publishing novelist that lasted from 1798 through 1801. Throughout such novels as WIELAND (1798), ORMOND (1799), ARTHUR MERVYN (1799-1800), and EDGAR HUNTLY (1799), Brown dramatizes how authorship and self-making constitute reciprocal processes. By drawing on Gothic and epistolary aesthetics as well as Enlightenment principles, Brown reveals how his subversive artist-figures reject ideological confinements of attending social forms, whether theological, cultural, or political.
