Research on the Contagion Model and Community Construction in Charles Brown's Novels

Abstract

In the 1790s, with the influx of strange immigrants and violent conflicts, how to deal with the tension between sympathetic communities based on resonance and "non-citizens" who make different voices has become an increasingly concerned issue for American intellectuals. As the first American novelist who fully realized the limitations of Locke's rational faculty and discussed it, Charles Brockden Brown took the "yellow fever" that broke out in 1973 as the breakthrough point. At first, he used the epidemic disease to amplify the defects of the sympathetic community. Hence, he revealed its inapplicability in the United States, and then took contagions as a metaphor, and conceived another more inclusive community model based on various strange and external factors.