ABSTRACT
Charles Brockden Brown was a man of letters who was unsure of himself, his marital status, and his social position in the early republic. He used the Monthly Magazine and American Review as a vehicle for establishing a male readership, for challenging the negative stereotype of the single man and the positive stereotype of the married man, and for validating bachelorhood as a viable alternative form of early republican masculinity. Through his editorial and authorial duties, he demonstrated that bachelors were men of reason and self-control with a definite interest in the social stability and ultimate prosperity of the new nation. What, then, is the larger significance of this line of argument? How do the findings in the previous chapters shed light on gender studies? The more familiar aspects of Brown’s career? Other early national periodicals? Works of belles lettres from late eighteenth-century America? On other authors of American literature?
