SOURCE: Christophersen, Bill. “Picking Up the Knife: A Psycho-Historical Reading of Wieland.” American Studies 27, no. 1 (spring 1986): 115-26.

In the following essay, Christophersen focuses on Clara's transformation as a metaphor for the transformation of America from British colony to young nation.

Literature … has a relationship to social and intellectual history, not as documentation, but as symbolic illumination.¹

Edwin S. Fussell, in his essay “Wieland: A Literary and Historical Reading,” goes far toward establishing a political/historical context for Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation (1798). He identifies the transformation of patria that Brown and his generation had experienced as the real antecedent of the subtitle. Suggesting that, figuratively speaking, the newly nationalized writer of Brown's era was, like Carwin, a biloquist—a British “speaker” become American—and stressing the almost causal role writing had played in the American Revolution, Fussell sees this novel that pivots on biloquial voices and...