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The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition is a project dedicated to publishing the uncollected writings of Charles Brockden Brown.

Born to intellectual Quaker parents in 1771 and trained as a lawyer, Brown was one of the most important literary innovators of his age. In addition to creating novels rich with psychological and philosophical complexity, he was one of the earliest authors of short stories. He also excelled in the genre of the essay, became the first American literary critic of note, introducing in his magazines extended reviews of new American publications, and developed provocative theories of historiography and fiction that point ahead to the 20th century. Of the post-revolutionary generation of writers, few— Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, William Dunlap, Joel Barlow, or Susanna Rowson—had the range of interests, the critical alertness, or the scientific acuity of Brown. His mind was molded in that last moment of the late Enlightenment when the desire to master the arts and the natural sciences was one, and knowledge was freely disseminated.

Our edition builds on, supplements, and contextualizes the Bicentennial Edition of The Novels and Related Works, published between 1977 and 1987 under the general editorship of Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid. Consisting of six volumes and containing the novels Wieland (1977), Arthur Mervyn (1980), Ormond (1983), Edgar Huntly (1984), Clara Howard and Jane Talbot (1986), and the dialogue Alcuin (1987), the Bicentennial Edition became a landmark in modern Brown scholarship. Paperback editions of individual novels based on the Kent State University Press texts have since been published for classroom use, and Sydney J. Krause edited a one-volume edition of three novels for the Library of America. This has done much to re-establish Brown as an important novelist in the American canon. The Bicentennial Edition, however, constitutes no more than half of Brown’s writings; not represented are (at present count) 546 printed texts and 183 letters. This count includes his book, theater and music reviews, philosophical essays, reflections on law, religion, nationhood, geography, history, literature, political economy, medicine, science, and sexuality, as well as his short fiction, letters, and poetry. (Only letters and poems survive in manuscript form.)

Equally as important, revisionist scholarship over the last 20 years—driven by the new historicism, interdisciplinary cultural studies, poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, gender, and queer theory, and other approaches—has also drawn our attention back to Brown. This upsurge in interest, which focuses attention on the postrevolutionary historical moment and the North Atlantic cultural and intellectual contexts of the 1790s, has begun to revise our notion of Brown as an intellectual and of the cultural milieu in which he wrote, recognizing him as a versatile encyclopedist, like Thomas Jefferson, who was widely read in English, German, and French literature and who engaged in many of the early republic's—and the period's—political, philosophical, and social controversies.

The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition aims to identify, transcribe, organize, and ultimately edit Brown's uncollected writings, making them searchable in an electronic environment . Access to these texts will cast new light on Brown as a novelist, editor, and historian, revise his stature among the intellectuals of the new republic, and enhance our understanding of authorship and the dynamics of print culture in his day.