SU's Wenke Authors Book on Author Brockden Brown
By SU Public Relations
SALISBURY, MD---Dr. John Wenke, Salisbury University professor of English, recently authored a new book, American Proteus: Narrative Self-Making in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown.
The book offers a look into the career of Brown (1771-1810), and his evolution as an author. Brown published for just four years, from 1798-1801, authoring novels such as Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly. For economic reasons related to his impending marriage and the need to make a living to support a family, he gave up on the novel form, but he remained a prolific writer of essays, poems, and pamphlets.
He was also an editor of a number of magazines. He was an accomplished multi-tasker if there ever was one. Even while he was writing and publishing his six novels, he was engaged in a host of other publication projects. Brown was a major influence on the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathanial Hawthorne.
American Proteus seeks to explain what it means for Brown to have created, out of his life experiences and encompassing cultural milieu, a novel kind of fiction for a new kind of country. As a work of biographical criticism, Wenke’s study charts the emergence of Brown's authorial voice as it developed throughout an amorphous, multifaceted, and conflicted apprenticeship. This 11-year period of literary experimentation established the foundation for his brief, yet momentous, publishing career.
Throughout Brown’s novels, authorship appears variously as a compositional act, a histrionic activity, and an expression of political provocation and domination. Wenke notes this concern with authorship achieves its most complex manifestation via the agency of narrative self-making. From this perspective, the poetics and politics of self-making have distinct personal, cultural, and political ramifications, especially considering how Brown constructs synergistic versions of the “American Tale” out of the importation and transfiguration of transatlantic literary and ideational materials.
Available October 7, from Mercer University Press, the book will be available in paperback and e-book.
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