The Archive
Access the Archive
Users can access through a single portal the texts of all Brown’s primary works, along with a secondary bibliography.
Users may browse “The Comprehensive Primary Bibliography of the Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, 1783-1822” or search full-text transcriptions of 992 TEI P5-encoded texts, which include all of Brown’s novels, periodical writings, letter manuscripts (facsimile), and other writings as well as writings that are designated as “hybrid” because of his use of material by other authors.
For primary publications, an "A" at the end of a citation indicates that a work is indisputably written by Brown, while "B" indicates a high degree of confidence of Brown's authorship. Brown's periodical writing also includes a range of hybrid texts in which Brown excerpts, summarizes, and otherwise creatively edits and shapes other works while adding his own implicit or explicit commentary and contextual framing within each particular magazine issue. Such texts are marked "H" to correspond with "hybrid." Included in the bibliography are items that were removed after they were identified as works of other authors.
The Secondary Bibliography, which is not full-text, contains 1,230 items, dates back to 1796, and is regularly updated. In addition to author, date, keyword, and title searches, one may use assigned Library of Congress Subject Headings. Like the primary bibliography, one may browse and search secondary bibliography materials.
Users of the archive can also view PDF versions of Daniel Edwards Kennedy’s massive unedited biography on Brown.
The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition is affiliated with the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and 18thConnect. The primary and secondary bibliographic information is available through NINES.
For the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition protocols see: 2016 Protocols
For a critical description of archival processes and procedures, see “The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive: Mapping Archival Access and Metadata.” Archive Journal 4 (Spring 2014) http://www.archivejournal.net/issue/4/archives-remixed/. Mark L. Kamrath, Philip Barnard, Rudy McDaniel, William Dorner, Kevin Jardaneh, Patricia Carlton, Josejuan Rodriguez.
For access to TEI markup files, please see each individual text.
Contact the editors regarding the archive's contents.
About the Archive
This archive uses XTF to index bibliographical and primary source document materials.
The bibliographical materials consist of Brown's primary works along with several thousand secondary citations that are regularly updated. However, there are various degrees of certainty associated with Brown's texts in the archive, and the number of texts in the database is subject to some fluctuation as textual authorship is determined. We currently designate each text as either “A” (Brown's authorship is certain), “B” (Brown's authorship is likely but not certain), or “H” (Brown’s work is conflated with that of other people), based on the weight of external and internal textual evidence.
To date, 992 TEI P5-encoded full-text primary source documents have been transcribed, coded, and proofed against the originals with a high degree of accuracy. This includes Brown's novels, periodical writings, letter manuscripts (facsimile), and other publications. All of his writings are now available through a single portal.
The TEI encoding of these texts is also available to users. Our metadata has undergone peer-review and is also affiliated with NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and 18thCentury Connect.
The production of seven MLA-CSE approved print volumes of material represents a subset of the archive, and provides historical and textual essays for each volume, extensive annotation, and other apparatus. The volumes are being published by Bucknell University Press.
Kennedy Biography, c. 1948
Users of the archive can also access Daniel Edwards Kennedy’s massive unedited biography on Brown, courtesy of the Kent State University Institute for Bibliography and Editing.*
Using the Table of Contents and/or the Index to determine which sections to download.
Front/Backmatter (2MB)
Sections 1-10 (107MB)
Sections 11-20 (91MB)
Sections 21-30 (70MB)
Sections 31-40 (22MB)
Sections 41-49 (24MB)
*Special note: On November 30, 2005, Special Collections at the University of Virginia, based on legal concerns, removed from its collection photographs of a number of manuscript Brown documents that it had received years earlier from manuscript dealers. The University of Virginia never owned the documents, but possessed photographs that dealers had used to interest the library in purchasing them. These documents have passed into private collections where they are unlocatable and the photographs were thus the only public and locatable record of them. While some of these photographs reproduce items available elsewhere (e.g.., in the Kennedy typescript biography), others are of items otherwise unavailable and effectively lost. In our archive, we have therefore preserved reproductions made from photocopies that document these items which, prior to 2005, were part of the Charles Brockden Brown collection at the Clifton Walker Barrett Library. For more information, please see the University of Virginia collection page, containing the removal notice, the pre-2005 catalog list, and 38 scanned reproductions from the collection.