ABSTRACT
American Gothic is a refraction of English: where English Gothic has a direct past to deal with. American has a level interposed between present and past, the level represented by a vague historical 'Europe', an often already mythologised 'Old World'. Washington Irving described Europe as beingrich in the accumulated treasures of age. Charles Brockden Brown, renowned as America's first professional man of letters, was born in 1771 in Philadelphia, at that time a city of great importance. His letters and other writings reveal a curious intellectual mixture: his accounts of early poetical ambitions and reveries about natural objects read as romantic in the Keatsian sense. Charles early reading included most of the Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Rousseau and Paine. His attempts at understanding the interrelations of society and ideology were formative in terms of American Gothic. They look towards both Hawthorne's obsession with religious dogmatism and its social effects, and Poe's minute analyses of situations of terror.
