Product Description

Called a “remarkable story” by John Greenleaf Whittier and described by John Keats as “very powerful,” Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown’s disturbing 1798 tale of terror, is a masterpiece involving spontaneous combustion, disembodied voices, religious mania, and a gruesome murder based on a real-life incident.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes Wieland’s fragmentary sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, as well as several other important but hard-to-find Brockden Brown short stories, including “Thessalonica,” “Walstein’s School of History,” and “Death of Cicero.” This collection also reproduces the newspaper account of the murder that inspired Wieland.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #817667 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-11
• Released on: 2002-06-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 412 pages

From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up-By Charles Brockden Brown. This first American Gothic tale concerns psychotic characters, ventriloquism, murder.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
?Brown was a man of genius.??William Hazlitt -- Review

Review
“Brown was a man of genius.”—William Hazlitt

Customer Reviews

the best edition of Wieland

This Modern Library edition is the finest available paperback edition of Wieland. The cover art is compelling, the margins are wide enough to notate, the paper is of decent quality, the text is authoritative, Caleb Crain's introduction is even better than Norman Grabo's introduction for Penguin, and, as if that were not enough, we finally get a couple of Brown's oustanding short stories--not the lame, too-often anthologized Somnambulism, but Thessalonica, an astonishing, apocalyptic tale of civil strife, together with several other pieces worthy of note. As an appendix, we get the viscerally appalling, absolutely hair-raising, newspaper story which Brown fictionalized as Wieland (one wonders whether King and Kubrick read it too for snowy axe chase in the Shining).

Intellectual Gothic
These days, one rarely hears of Charles Brockden Brown unless one happens to be a literature professor/student. Brown has somehow managed to disappear from the radar, but I smell a revival in the future.
I absolutely loved this book. Not only is Wieland the first American gothic novel (1798), but it combines elements from the seduction novels that were also popular at that time. And more importantly, this work speaks to the precariousness of America as a nation at the time of writing. The book is loaded with metaphors, right down to the names of the characters.
Throughout the novel, battle lines are being drawn between religious belief and the hard science of the Enlightenment. The author, in many ways, shows us the many gradations between light and dark--but most of all--draws a very interesting parallel between Clara and Carwin, the only two narrators. "Wieland" proper is directly followed by another piece called "Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist"...you must read these two pieces in conjunction in order to realize the full gravity of Brown's genius. If you are willing to commit to a close reading, you will quickly find that things are not always what they seem. You will also likely begin to realize a bizarre parallel between the two narrators, which you may find deliciously surprising if you are anything like me.
The book was actually fashioned after a true story about a man who killed his wife and children in "the name of God." If that doesn't interest you, I don't know what does! If this book tells us anything, it is that we must rely on all of our senses, not just one, if we want to survive. In this work, characters rely heavily on hearing alone...and many pay severely for it.
The Modern Library edition is a bit expensive but it is a terrific copy and includes the actual newspaper article describing the crime---not all of the publications of Wieland do this.
The only other thing I want to mention is that there are some genuinely creepy things going on in this book, and the beauty of it is, none of it is supernatural. The psychology of man is a very complex thing, indeed, and this novel proves it.
Very satisfying and highly recommended.

An early American tale of horror
A man's mysterious death by spontaneous combustion and the injuries from it. A woman hears voices whispering in her closet, but when she opens the door, she finds nothing there. Her brother experiences what he thinks is the voice of God, ordering him to commit horrible crimes to prove his devotion.

Sounds like elements from a Hollywood horror movie? They're actually some of the mysterious and frightening things that happen in this early American horror novel, written by a man who was also a religious scholar and one of America's earliest feminists. Like a lot of early American novels, the style is somewhat effusive, veering between staid rationality and near-hysteria, and it's somewhat intricate sentences may be a bit long-winded to some modern readers. I've seen it compared to Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King, but I think it's more fair to compare it to Henry James or Nathanial Hawthorne, since the horror is generally more psychological and a bit understated. But it's that understatement which makes it all the more chilling...