Wieland

Weiland (1798), by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the first Gothic horror novels printed in America and one of the earliest works in American literature to be influenced by European Romanticism. The narrative appears to have been based on newspaper accounts of the James Yates murders, in which a New York native murdered his wife and four children, claiming that the Holy Spirit told him to do so. Brown often fused history and fiction as a means of exploring progressive social issues like mental illness, slavery, and abuse.

Brown is one of the most highly regarded American authors of the 18th century. He was the first American author to have his works translated into French and German. Other American authors considered him a significant influence, including Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper. In England, Brown was influenced by well-known social progressive writers and thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage. Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley, reread Brown’s novels while she was writing Frankenstein.

This study guide refers to the Kindle edition of Weiland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist Digireads.com Publishing (December 23, 2019).