Arthur Mervyn

 Please, Not the Hospital!

Set against the backdrop of the devastating Yellow Fever epidemic that shook Philadelphia in the fall of 1793, Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn, or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 raises fascinating questions about city life and the cosmopolitan consciousness under duress.  The fever is an urban crisis that tests and (possibly) strengthens civic bonds.  Brockden Brown portrays the fever as miasmic.  Like many others of his time, Brown believed that the disease was carried by "bad air"—and that certain spaces (like houses) could become infected and contagious.  Though Yelow Fever in this novel is not directly transmitted from one person to another, carriers can infect the people who live with them by infecting the space.  How does this motif carry over into the novel's other concerns—namely, with the webs of fraud and deceit that dominate Book One and the more positive connections Arthur makes in Book Two? 

Charles Brockden Brown Society Website

Philadelphia Under Siege by Samuel A. Gum

Close Reading Guidelines

Close Reading Guidelines 

Arthur Mervyn Close Reading due September 24.

Through close reading and writing about literature, you can develop strong analytic and argumentative skills.  To do a close reading, go back to the text (after you’ve finished reading the whole thing) and select a short passage (a paragraph is usually perfect) that you found particularly interesting, troubling, or important.  The issues at work in the short passage should tie in to and help illuminate some kind of broader question, concern, or pattern in the text.  Carefully reread and analyze the passage, looking up any words you don’t know well. You can access the Oxford English Dictionary on line through the Healey Library Website; I would recommend that you do this in order to see whether words had different, now lost, meanings in the nineteenth century.  A good close reading weaves together very close attention to the specific details and language of the passage with the larger issues of the text. 

Here are some things to consider (not all of these concerns apply to every passage!):

·      Tone: What is the tone of the passage?  How is that tone conveyed?

·      Point of View:  Whose point of view governs the passage?  What do you see—and what is obscured—through the lens of this point of view? What point(s) of view are left out or considered less important?

·      Language: Pay attention to the individual words in the passage.  What kinds of adjectives, verbs and adverbs appear?  How do they connect the passage to the text as a whole?  How does language help build a sense of character, setting, theme?  Think about the denotations (dictionary definitions) and connotations (associations) for key words.

·      Setting:  How do details describing the setting or environment function in the passage?  What does the setting say about the text’s characters?  its themes?

·      Characters: What facets of different characters/relationships surface in your passage?  Does your passage reveal anything surprising or expected about the character?

·      Dialogue: What does a character’s way of speaking reveal about that individual?  What about the interactions between characters?

Format: Retype the passage at the top of your first page.  Note the page number.  Quote ONLY from the passage you choose, and THOROUGHLY ANALYZE your quotes.  Make sure that you are making a clear point, and make sure that this point makes sense within the larger context of the book.  Your analysis will be at least twice as long as the passage.  In it, you should attend to the details of the text, and use your reading of the details to help you make a larger contention about a larger idea at work in the text.

Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple

Susanna Rowson

Tonight we'll discuss Charlotte Temple, or Charlotte, a Tale of Truth as it was known to British and American readers before publisher Mathew Carey retitled it in 1797.  Charlotte was the first best-selling novel in America.  Tonight we'll think about why, especially in the context of Rowson's career.  Of special interest are any connections we might make between Charlotte  and Amelia, as well as the two texts' treatment of New York and London.

 

In his 1828 introduction to Charlotte's Daughter; or, The Three Orphans (A Sequel to Charlotte Temple), Samuel L. Knapp wrote,  

 

No writer of fiction has enjoyed a greater popularity in this country than Mrs. Rowson. Of "Charlotte Temple" upwards of twenty-five thousand copies were sold in a short time after its appearance, and three sets of stereotype plates are at present sending forth their interminable series of editions, in different parts of the country. . . .

 

As Elias Nason put it in his 1870 Memoir of Mrs. Rowson:

It has stolen its way alike into the study of the divine and the workshop of the mechanic; into the parlor of the accomplished lady and into the bed-chamber of her waiting maid; into the log-hut on the extreme border of modern civilization and into the forecastle of the whale ship on the lonely ocean. It has been read by the grey-bearded professor after his "divine Plato"; by the beardless clerk after balancing his accounts at night; by the traveler waiting for the next conveyance at the village inn; by the school girl stealthfully in her seat at school. It has beguiled the woodman in his hut at night in the deep solitudes of the silent forest; it has cheated the farmer's son of many an hour while poring over its fascinating pages, seated on [p. 51] broken spinning wheel in the attic; it has drawn tears from the miner's eye in the dim twilight of his subterranean dwelling; it has unlocked the secret sympathies of the veteran soldier in his tent before the day of battle.

an older Susanna Rowson

Resources for Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791, England; 1794, U.S.), the nation's first best-selling novel.

Full text of Charlotte Temple:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/171/171.txt

Four Critics on Charlotte Temple:
http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/enam854/ctemple.html

Historical and Biographical Information from Francis W. Halsey's 1905 Edition

SYLLABUS

Here's the course syllabus.  I'll post other class handouts after we discuss them in class.

English 697-2 Syllabus

First Class

Monday, September 10

Today we'll look at Amelia and Theresa Strouth Gaul's essay, "Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy's Future."  Gaul argues that we are in a particularly exciting moment for the study of early American writers.  We'll look at why that's the case, and think about how our class might benefit from and contribute to the scholarly trends she notes.
Amelia is by the famous author Anonymous.  We don't know the gender of Amelia's writer--does that make a difference?  Either way, how does Amelia—and our experience of reading Amelia as part of the "Just Teach One" project—intersect with some of the trends in scholarship that Gaul explores?
See you at 4--
Betsy