Ideas taking shape. The Preliminary Bibliography

These things never format quite right when applying them from Word to an HTML base. I will fix this up at some later juncture. Glad I got to use that word.

Anyway, my research has led me down two really interesting avenues. One of which I have long since been a researcher of and that's Physiognomy. Physiognomy is the judgment of a person's character by their physical appearance, particularly facial features like the eyes, nose, etc. The long history I have with this phenomena can probably be told at a later time but for now I'm really interested in reading Ormond through this lense.

And in a possibly related avenue, or possibly not, a lot of these resources seem to address the female identity in Charles Brockden Brown. I'm currently thinking of how physiognomy in particular shapes the female identity within Ormond. We will see where this leads


Comment, Kristin M. "Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic." Early American Literature 40. 57-78.

Ellis, Scott. "Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond, Property Exchange, and the Literary Marketplace in the Early American Republic." Studies in the Novel 37. 1-19.

Layson, Hana. "Rape and Revolution: Feminism, Antijacobinism, and the Politics of Injured Innocence in Brockden Brown's Ormond." Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2, 160-191.

Lukasik, Christopher. "'The Vanity of Physiognomy': Dissimulation and Discernment in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond." Amerikastudien/American Studies 50:3. 485-505.

Parker, Patricia L. Charles Brockden Brown: a reference guide. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.

Shapiro, Stephen. “In a French Position: Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond or the Secret Witness Foster, Thomas A. Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 357-384.

Stern, Julia. "The State of 'Women' in Ormond; or, Patricide in the New Nation." Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic. Ed. Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 182-215.

Wood, Sarah F. "Foul Contagion and Perilous Asylums: The Role of the Refugee in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn." Overhere: a European Journal of American Culture 18:3 (Autumn), 82-92.