(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,

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…

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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 17 July 2025.]