SOURCE: "Charles Brockden Brown," in American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, The University Press of Kentucky, 1982, pp. 36-57.

In the following essay, Ringe states that while the liberal ideas of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft may have been important to Brown, it was British and German Gothic writers such as Matthew Gregory Lewis, Eliza Parson, and Cajetan Tschink who influenced the style and substance of Brown's fiction. Ringe further argues that in Wieland and Edgar Huntly Brown attempts to establish his own interpretation of the Gothic mode, adapted to the conditions of American life.

To discuss the novels of Charles Brockden Brown only in terms of contemporary Gothic fiction is to view them from an admittedly limited point of view. A man of strong intellectual curiosity, Brown read widely in both traditional and contemporary literature. Echoes of Shakespeare and Milton are heard throughout his works, and...