Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland

Kellen Bolt (Elgin Community College)
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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…

3292 words

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.]

8790 Wieland 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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