Splitting the difference between the 1790s and the 1970s.
Books
William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Other Writings
ed. Jennifer Harris and Bryan Waterman (Broadview, 2024)
Eighteenth-century readers were just as interested in gossip—especially about the rich and powerful—as contemporary readers. This volume contains the full text of William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, the “first American novel,” along with the related plays Sans Souci, alias, Free and Easy and Occurrences of the Times, all of which draw on contemporary scandal and intrigue among the elite of Boston in constructing their plots. Situating the works within their milieu, the editors highlight the experiences of actual readers to explain why these scandals were so compelling on personal and political levels.
Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School: A Norton Critical Edition
ed. Jennifer Harris and Bryan Waterman (W.W. Norton, 2012)
Published anonymously in 1797, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette grabbed American interest with its ripped-from-the-headlines story of sex and scandal. A steady best seller for decades, the seduction novel was passed down through generations; indeed, its heroine became better known than the book’s author. A year later, Foster’s lesser-known follow-up, The Boarding School, provided an equally compelling portrait of women at the turn of the nineteenth century in the same epistolary form. Both novels can now be read in conversation with each other in this new Norton Critical Edition based on the respective first edition texts. The texts are joined with a detailed introduction to Foster’s legacy and Elizabeth Whitman’s life along with explanatory annotations and a note on the text.
Television’s Marquee Moon (33 1/3 Series;
Bloomsbury, 2011)
[Also available in Spanish.]
Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs an awning with the new name for his venue. The place will be called CBGB & OMFUG which, he tells them, stands for “Country Bluegrass and Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.” That’s exactly the sort of stuff they play, they lie, somehow managing to get a gig out of him. After the first show their band, Television, lands a regular string of Sundays. By the end of the year a scene has developed that includes Tom Verlaine’s new love interest, a poet-turned rock chanteuse named Patti Smith. American punk rock is born. Bryan Waterman peels back the layers of this origin myth and, assembling a rich historical archive, situates Marquee Moon in a broader cultural history of SoHo and the East Village.
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist: A Norton Critical Edition ed. Bryan Waterman (W.W. Norton, 2011)
The first gothic novel in America, Wieland (1798) is now available in a Norton Critical Edition. Wieland, the story of religious delusion and horrific violence on the eve of the American Revolution, is a cornerstone of the Early American literary canon. A family living on an estate outside Philadelphia is visited by a set of mysterious voices, seemingly coming out of thin air, that are followed soon after by an itinerant rustic named Carwin. Violence erupts when the family’s young patriarch believes he hears God’s voice demanding a human sacrifice as a sign of faith. The editor provides explanatory annotations throughout the volume.
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, ed. w/ Cyrus R.K. Patell (Cambridge, 2010)
Walt Whitman once described New York City as “the great place of the western continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond, of the New World.”
From its origins as a Dutch trading post called New Amsterdam to its embodiment of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, New York has always held a special place in America’s national mythology, a gateway to the USA and its premier cultural center. Illustrated and featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, this Companion explores a wide range of writing by and about New Yorkers, from early poetry and plays to modern punk rock.
In the 1790s, a single conversational circle—the Friendly Club—united New York City’s most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect, Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club’s intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place—the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City.
Articles
“Mediating the Novel in the Age of Warhol,”
in Cyrus Patell and Deborah Williams, eds. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 127-52.
“Age of Warhol,”
in Christopher Hager and Cody Marrs, eds. Timelines of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
“Later Years, 1795-1810,”
in Philip Barnard, Hilary Emmett, and Stephen Shapiro, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford UP, 2019), 24-43.
“Afterword,”
in Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (Signet, 2014).
“American Adventurers, Parisian Opportunities,”
Early American Literature 49:2 (2014): 571-582.
“Overshadowed New York,”
(w/ Cyrus R. K. Patell), American Literary History 24:4 (winter 2012): 853-863.
“‘Heaven protect us from such fathers’: Perez Morton and the Politics of Seduction,”
in Tita Chico and Toni Bowers, eds. Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), 49-64.
“Coquetry and Correspondence in Revolutionary-Era Connecticut: Reading Elizabeth Whitman’s Letters,”
Early American Literature 46:3 (winter 2011): 541-63.
Ed., “The Letters of Elizabeth Whitman to Joel and Ruth Barlow, 1779-1783,”
Early American Literature 46:3 (winter 2011): 565-600.
“Charles Brockden Brown and the Novels of the Early Republic,”
in Leonard Cassuto, ed. The Cambridge History of the American Novel (Cambridge, 2011), 51-66.
“The City on Stage,”
in Patell and Waterman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York (2010): 42-57.
“Elizabeth Whitman’s Disappearance and Her ‘Disappointment,’”
William and Mary Quarterly (April 2009): 325-64.
“Introduction: Reading Early America with Charles Brockden Brown,”
Early American Literature 44:2 (2009): 235-42.
“From Text/Context to ‘Situatedness’ in Atlantic History and Literature,”
William and Mary Quarterly (January 2008): 171-74. [Also published in Early American Literature 43:1 (2008): 191-95.]
“The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of the Public Sphere,”
William and Mary Quarterly (January 2005): 9-30. “Charles Brockden Brown, Revised and Expanded,” Early American Literature 40:1 (2005): 173-91.
“Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository and the Early Republic’s Knowledge Industries,”
American Literary History 15:2 (2003): 213-47.
“Men’s Worlds,”
Early American Literature 37:3 (2002): 537-49.
Reviews
Review of Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example, in Studies in the Novel 51:2 (2019).
Review of Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, in The Rumpus (25 Apr. 2013).
Review of Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919, in Journal of American History 99:2 (2012): 609.
Review of Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, in LA Review of Books (20 Jul. 2012).
Review of Sean Goudie, Creole America, in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 31:1 (2009).
Review of Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, in William and Mary Quarterly 66:3 (Jul. 2009): 636-39.
Review of Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English, in Journal of American History 95:4 (March 2009): 1140-41.
Review of Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, in The American Historical Review 113:2 (April 2008): 460-61.
Review of Mark Kamrath and Sharon Harris, eds., Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, in American Periodicals 16:2 (2006): 235-38.
Review of Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues, in The Wordsworth Circle 33:4 (Sept. 2002): 150-51.