Ashley Hales, ‘Was it proper to watch him at a distance?’: Spectatorship, Sympathy and Atlantic Migration in Edgar Huntly. Synbiosis 10.2 (October 2006) 133-146.

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 10.2

Essay Topics and Keywords:

Atlantic Migration, Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Edgar Huntly, Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature

An extract from this essay:

“Whereas … many critics have focused on Edgar Huntly’s psychoanalytic possibilities, and some more recently such as Jared Gardner have emphasised the novel’s political implications, I will elucidate how reading the novel through the genre of the emigration guide helps open up formal and thematic interpretation, as a first step towards unfolding questions of transatlantic sympathy.”

Ashley Hales

Ashley Hales is at the University of Edinburgh