Gothic Logic: Charles Brockden Brown and the Science of Sensationalism

This essay argues that in his particular brand of transatlantic Gothicism, Charles Brockden Brown (17711810) grafts an earlier, European branch of the Gothic narrative of the incredible and the supernatural on to the New World/New England strand of the apparition tale, producing in effect a vernacular American Gothic narrative of the empirical beyond in which printing and the discourse of science helped create bizarre and detailed tales reflecting the contemporaneous cultural forces of growing skepticism and materialism.