This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1803.
Charles Brockden Brown was an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period.
The Monk: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796. A quickly written book from early in Lewis's career, it was published before he turned twenty. It is a prime example of the type of Gothic that specialises in the aspect of horror. Its convoluted and scandalous plot has made it one of the most important Gothic novels of its time, often imitated and adapted for the stage and the screen.
The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music, and the goth subculture.
Edwin Greene O'Connor was an American journalist, novelist, and radio commentator. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1962 for his novel The Edge of Sadness (1961). His ancestry was Irish, and his novels concerned the Irish-American experience and often dealt with the lives of politicians and priests.
Arthur Mervyn is a novel written by Charles Brockden Brown. Published in 1799, Arthur Mervyn, one of Brown's more popular novels, represents Brown's dark, gothic style and subject matter, and is recognized as one of the most influential works of American and Philadelphia Gothic literature. It started earlier as a serial in Philadelphia's Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence, but it was discontinued because the magazine's other writers were not keen on the feature and the editor of the magazine died from yellow fever. Hence, Brown decided to issue the book himself. The novel also includes the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia between August–October 1793 as an important plot element.
The Romance of the Forest is a Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe that was first published in 1791. It combines an air of mystery and suspense with an examination of the tension between hedonism and morality. The novel was her first major, popular success, going through four editions in its first three years. Furthermore, "this novel also established her reputation as the first among her era's writers of romance. There is surprisingly little essential difference in characterization, Gothic décor, or plot outline to distinguish this novel from its predecessors. Its superior merit lies in the expansive and subtle use which the author makes of these elements so that the characters are relatively well realized, the Gothic décor is blended into the sensibility of the reader rather than imposed upon it, and the plot is an intricate and often dramatic series of congruent incidents and living tableaux, not a congeries of barely related and stillborn scenes and surprises.” Most critics who have given any attention to Radcliffe as a novelist have decided that she is important chiefly for her use of the supernatural, and for her emphasis upon landscape.
Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown and was published by Hugh Maxwell. The novel is considered an example of early American gothic literature, with themes such as wilderness anxiety, the supernatural, darkness, and irrational thought and fear.
M'Liss is a 1918 American silent comedy drama film directed by Marshall Neilan, written by Frances Marion and based on a Bret Harte story. The film was made previously in 1915 and was remade again in 1922 as The Girl Who Ran Wild, starring Gladys Walton. Another same-titled remake was released in 1936, starring Anne Shirley.
American Gothic Tales is an anthology of "gothic" American short fiction. Edited and with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, it was published by Plume in 1996. It featured contributions by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Anne Rice and others, and included over 40 stories.
American gothic fiction is a subgenre of gothic fiction. Elements specific to American Gothic include: rationality versus the irrational, puritanism, guilt, the uncanny, ab-humans, ghosts, and monsters.
Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist (1803–1805) is a story fragment written by Charles Brockden Brown and published over a period of two years in monthly installments of Brown's Literary Magazine. Brown never completed his story, and it has always remained unfinished, and unresolved. Carwin is technically the sequel to Brown's previous work, Wieland; or the Transformation, because Brown wrote it five years afterwards; however, the events in Carwin occur prior to the plot established in Wieland. Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist follows the life of a young man by the name of Carwin as he realizes his biloquial, or ventriloquist, talents. Carwin develops this ability to perfection, being able to manipulate his own voice to sound like any person he wants.
"The Mortal Immortal" is a short story from 1833 written by Mary Shelley. It tells the story of a man named Winzy, who drinks an elixir which makes him immortal. At first, immortality appears to promise him eternal tranquility. However, it soon becomes apparent that he is cursed to endure eternal psychological torture, as everything he loves dies around him.
The James Yates murders occurred in 1781, when James Yates brutally murdered his wife and his four children in New York, later claiming that a voice instructed him to do so.
Sky-Walk is the first completed novel by Charles Brockden Brown. It was started in 1797 and completed by March 1798, when an “Excerpt” was published in The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence. The novel was subsequently lost, though Brown's later novel Edgar Huntly takes up the same themes as Sky-Walk, most notably, that of sleepwalking. Like Brown's other novels, Sky-Walk is an example of the American Gothic novel.
Clara Howard was the second-to-last novel published by Charles Brockden Brown. First published in 1801, the novel is both an epistolary novel and a novel of manners which diverges, alongside the novel Jane Talbot from earlier novels by Brown which were more intense and radical Gothic fiction.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is an American literature, film, and media scholar who has been teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University since 2001. He has authored or edited twenty-nine books and a range of articles focusing on the American Gothic tradition, monsters, cult film and television, popular culture, weird fiction, pedagogy, and goth music. He is the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Seventy-Six is a historical fiction novel by American writer John Neal. Published in Baltimore in 1823, it is the fourth novel written about the American Revolutionary War. Historically distinguished for its pioneering use of colloquial language, Yankee dialect, battle scene realism, high characterization, stream of consciousness narrative, profanity, and depictions of sex and romance, the novel foreshadowed and influenced later American writers. The narrative prose resembles spoken American English more than any other literature of its period. It was the first work of American fiction to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch.
Cajetan Tschink was an Austrian writer, philosopher, and professor whose literary work primarily focused on skepticism of the supernatural. His most prominent work was the Gothic novel Geschichte eines Geistersehers. Aus den Papieren des Mannes mit der eisernen Larve, translated into English by Peter Will as The Victim of Magical Delusion.
Logan, a Family History is a Gothic novel of historical fiction by American writer John Neal. Published anonymously in Baltimore in 1822, the book is loosely inspired by the true story of Mingo leader Logan the Orator, while weaving a highly fictionalized story of interactions between Anglo-American colonists and Indigenous peoples on the western frontier of colonial Virginia. Set just before the Revolutionary War, it depicts the genocide of Native Americans as the heart of the American story and follows a long cast of characters connected to each other in a complex web of overlapping love interests, family relations, rape, and sexual activity.
