Often described as a "gothic novel," this is a classic American tale of mystery and murder with exciting and dramatic plot twists. Charles Brockden Brown is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. This volume contains a critical edition of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, the third of his novels to be published in 1799 and the first to deal with the American wilderness. The basis of the text is the first edition, printed and published by Hugh Maxwell in Philadelphia late in the year, but the "Fragment" printed independently in Brown's Monthly Magazine earlier in 1799 supplies some readings in Chapters 17-20. The Historical Essay, which follows the text, covers matters of composition, publication, historical background, and literary evaluation, and the Textual Essay discusses the transmission of the text, choice of copy-text, and editorial policy. A general textual statement for the entire edition appears in Volume I of the series.

As it tells the story of Constantia Dudley, from her family's financial collapse to her encounters with a series of cosmopolitan revolutionaries and reactionaries, Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799) develops a sustained meditation on late-Enlightenment debates concerning political liberty, women's rights, conventions of sex-gender, and their relation to the reshaping of an Atlantic world in the throes of transformation. This edition of Ormond includes Brown's Alcuin (1798), an important dialogue on women's rights and marriage, as well as his key essays on history and literature, along with selections from contemporary writings on women's education and revolution debates that figure in the novel's background and in the charged atmosphere of the late 1790s.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides a state-of-the-art survey of the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown, a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and U.S. Early Republic. The seven novels he published during his lifetime are now studied for their narrative complexity, innovations in genre, and social-political commentaries on life in early America and the revolutionary Atlantic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown wasbest known as an author of political romances in the gothic mode that proved to be widely influential in romantic era, and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel.

It was only after serving as a chaplain in the American Revolution, playing an important role in the Whiskey Rebellion, and serving (often controversially) on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, that Hugh Henry Brackenridge composed his great comic epic. Published in installments over the twenty-eight–year period beginning with Washington's presidency ending with that of Madison, this irreverent and ribald novel, relating the misadventures of Captain Farrago and his sidekick, Teague O'Regan, leaves no major ethnic, racial, religious, or political issue of the period unscathed.