Wieland; or The Transformation. An American Tale (1798) ushered the gothic into the nascent literary sphere of the United States and launched the brief, albeit consequential, fiction-writing career of Charles Brockden Brown (1771 – 1810). The first of four gothic novels published within two years, Wieland is a first-person epistolatory novel told by Clara Wieland about how the devious “biloquism” of Francis Carwin—an American-born, self-styled vagabond who flees Ireland and Spain—tests the limits of sensibility and rational thinking in the three main characters. By mimicking and “throwing” the voices of other characters, Carwin, sometimes deliberately and sometimes inadvertently, exposes the weaknesses of Theodore Wieland’s Calvinist-inflected republicanism, Henry Pleyel’s rational, dispassionate skepticism, and Clara Wieland’s equanimous sensibility. Published six months after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Wieland not only engages questions of the...
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Citation: Bolt, Kellen. "Wieland". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 May 2025 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8790, accessed 09 June 2026.]
