November 12, 2013

UCF English professor Mark L Kamrath, General Editor of the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, recently co-edited The Letters and Early Epistolary Writings of Charles Brockden Brown (2013), a 960-page volume of Brown’s correspondence and related writings.

Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions grant, the letters were edited by Kamrath, along with Textual Editor Philip Barnard (University of Kansas) and Elizabeth Hewitt (Ohio State University). John R. Holmes (Franciscan University) and Fritz Fleischmann (Babson College) served as Consulting Editors, while UCF Texts and Technology Ph.D, student William Dorner served as Assistant Editor. The letters were published by Bucknell University Press, in partnership with The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is a key writer of the revolutionary era and U.S. early republic, known for his landmark novels and other writings in a variety of genres. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents all of Brown’s non-novelistic writings—letters, political pamphlets, fiction, periodical writings, historical writings, and poetry—in a seven-volume scholarly edition.

Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, volume 1 of the series, presents, for the first time, Brown’s complete extant correspondence along with three early epistolary fiction fragments. Brown’s 179 extant letters provide essential context for reading his other works and a wealth of information about his life, family, associates, and the wider cultural life of the revolutionary period and Early Republic. The volume’s three epistolary fragments are the earliest examples of Brown’s fiction and are transcribed here for the first time in complete and definitive texts.

The volume’s historical texts are fully annotated and accompanied by Historical and Textual Essays, as well as other appended materials, including the most complete and accurate information available concerning Brown’s correspondents and family history.

For further information about the project, see The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition. To obtain a print or electronic volume of the letters, see the book on Amazon.com.