Edgar Huntly: or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker

Charles Brockden Brown

may, 2018 · Broadview Press

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Edgar Huntly is a compelling tale of sleepwalking, murder, and frontier violence set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1780s. His memory and wits shaken by the scenes he has witnessed, ordinary republican citizen Edgar Huntly relates the unpredictable and catastrophic consequences of his chance encounter with Clithero Edny, a mysterious Irish immigrant whose unfortunate but violent history catches up with him in the New World. Huntly’s growing obsession with Clithero plunges both men into physical and mental danger, unsettling the colonial territories of the Delaware basin and the cognitive territory of Huntly’s own mind. Brockden Brown’s artful sensationalism transplants the European form of the gothic romance to the new United States, yielding one of the most exciting, metaphysically sophisticated, and historically self-aware novels in early American literary culture.

This Broadview Edition includes a rich selection of historical materials on the gothic and sublime, sleepwalking, captivity narratives, and early American literary nationalism.

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Siân Silyn Roberts is Associate Professor at Queens College, City University of New York.