SOURCE: "Charles Brockden Brown's Ambivalence Toward Art and Imagination," in Essays in Literature, Vol. X, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 55-69.

In the following essay, Bennett contends that Brown 's novels reflect his effort to reconcile reason and imagination and concludes that Brown 's rejection of fiction was based on the triumph of his "moral distrust" of the form of the romance over his need to create.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing tendency to accept Charles Brockden Brown's work on its own terms rather than merely as an awkward provincial imitation of that of Richardson, Godwin, and Radcliffe. There is a greater willingness to regard many of his artistic strengths as conscious achievements and his putative "faults" as equally intentional attempts at innovation.¹ Of course, the haste with which Brown composed is a matter of record, and there are always those critics who regard much of his work in...