The Brown Society invites papers for its 2008 conference in Dresden, Germany, on October 9-11, 2008. The conference theme is Empire, Revolution, and New Identities: Geoculture and Geopolitics in Brown and his Contemporaries. Read More

Congratulations to Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro on their recent edition of Arthur Mervyn (Hackett 2008). This edition is designed along lines similar to the previous Hackett edition of Edgar Huntly. It includes a substantial bibliography and selection of related texts by Brown ("Portrait of an Emigrant"; "What is a Jew?"; "On the Consequences of Abolishing the Slave Trade to the West Indian Colonies," etc.) and his contemporaries (excerpts from Mathew Carey’s account of the yellow fever epidemic; almost all of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s landmark pamphlet on the free black community’s role in public responses to the epidemic; abolitionist addresses by Friendly Club members Smith, Dwight, and Miller, and so on).

Congratulations also to Stephen Shapiro on his recent publication The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (University Park: Penn State UP, 2008). Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown’s Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a reflection of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system.