gisiger@nerdculture.de#Wieland is an odd book (albeit a good one). Though Brown declared independence from European culture, the influence of popular #gothic tropes are obvious. It doesn’t even have the weirdest opening of that genre—in the first few pages of the English novelist Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, from 1764, a character is pulverized by a giant helmet that mysteriously falls from the sky. Brown’s novel, however, is gothic in a manner that could only be American, and one particular to the mid-Atlantic, where eccentric sects proliferated, including Anabaptists, Moravians, the Ephrata Community, and Kelpius’s own apocalyptic, cave-dwelling “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness.”
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/07/20/charles-brockden-brown-declares-independence/