Edgar Huntley - Brown, Charles Brockden

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Résumé :
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker by Charles Brockden Brown. Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown. Edgar Huntly, a young man who lives with his uncle and sisters (his only remaining family) on a farm outside Philadelphia, is determined to learn who murdered his friend Waldegrave. Walking near the elm tree under which Waldegrave was killed late one night, Huntly sees Clithero, a servant from a neighboring farm, half-dressed, digging in the ground and weeping loudly. Huntly concludes that Clithero may be the murderer. He also concludes that Clithero is sleepwalking. Huntly decides to follow Clithero when he sleep walks. Clithero leads Huntly through rough countryside, but all this following doesn't lead to Huntly learning much about the murder. Eventually, Huntly confronts Clithero when they are both awake and demands that he confess. Clithero does confess, but not to Waldegrave's murder. Instead he tells a complicated story about his life in Ireland, where he believes he was responsible for the death of a woman who was his patron, after which he fled to Pennsylvania. Clithero claims to know nothing about Waldegrave's murder.

Biographie:
Charles Brockden Brown (1771 - 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the early American novel, or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was not the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.