Episode 2465
Brother Jonathan (novel)
Sat, 2024-Feb-03 00:42 UTC
Length - 3:28
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.
The featured article for Saturday, 3 February 2024 is Brother Jonathan (novel).
Brother Jonathan: or, the New Englanders is an 1825 historical novel by American writer John Neal. The title refers to Brother Jonathan, a popular personification of New England and the broader United States. The story follows protagonist Walter Harwood as he and the nation around him both come of age through the American Revolution. The novel explores cross-cultural relationships and highlights cultural diversity within the Thirteen Colonies, stressing egalitarianism and challenging the conception of a unified American nation. It features mixed-race Anglo-Indigenous characters and depicts them as the inheritors of North America. The book's sexual themes drew negative reactions from contemporary critics. These themes were explicit for the period, addressing female sexual virtue and male guilt for sexual misdeeds.
Literature scholars have praised Brother Jonathan's extensive and early use of realism in depicting American culture and speech. Using phonetic transcriptions, the dialogue documents a wide range of regional accents and colloquialisms. Included in the dialogue is a likely-accurate depiction of American Indian English, and what may be American literature's earliest attempt to express a wide range of emotion using children's natural speech patterns. Neal's characterizations of American character and speech were praised in the UK but derided in the US. The author nevertheless considered them central to developing an American literature distinct from British precedent.
Neal wrote the original manuscript while crossing the Atlantic from Baltimore in early 1824, then revised it in London many times before convincing William Blackwood of Edinburgh to publish it in mid-1825. It is Neal's longest work and possibly the longest single work of American fiction until well into the twentieth century. The editing process was the most laborious of Neal's career and resulted in a number of inconsistencies in the plot. The author fashioned many of the deleted sections into separate works he published later. Considered one of America's top novelists at the time, Neal wrote Brother Jonathan with a British audience in mind in order to boost his reputation internationally. It was a financial failure that received mixed but mostly warm reviews at the time. Twenty-first century readers are generally unaware of the book, and many scholars consider it too complex to be considered good.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:42 UTC on Saturday, 3 February 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see Brother Jonathan (novel) on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm Kendra Standard.
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