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''Sky-Walk'' (alternatively ''Sky Walk'', ''Skywalk'', etc.) is the first completed novel by Charles Brockden Brown. It was started in 1797 and completed by March 1798, when an “Excerpt” was published in ''The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence''. The novel was subsequently lost, though Brown’s later novel ''Edgar Huntly'' takes up the same themes as ''Sky-Walk'', most notably, that of sleepwalking. Like Brown’s other novels, ''Sky-Walk'' is an example of the American Gothic novel. ==Publication and Reception== On March 17, 1798, an advertisement appeared in ''The Weekly Magazine'' for the novel entitled ''Sky-Walk, or, The Man Unknown to Himself: An American Tale''. This advertisement, signed “Speratus”, introduces both the novel and the author as new and revolutionary, remarking that the author “does not rest his hopes upon the indulgence due to the unripeness of his age, and limitedness of his experience”. It also assures the reader that the novel is, at least in part, “a picture of truth. Facts have supplied the foundation of the whole”.〔Speratus, "Letter 1 – No Title," ''The Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence'' Mar 17, 1798; 1, 7; American Periodicals Series Online: 202〕 Using newspaper stories and other real life events to draw upon for his novels was a well-known device of Brown’s, such as in the case of ''Wieland'', though the authenticity of this claim in the case of either ''Sky-Walk'' or ''Edgar Huntly'' is in doubt, as the newspaper which Brown claims to have read the inspirational story in does not appear to have been available to him.〔''Edgar Huntly..'', Bibliographical entries II, III〕 The advertisement espouses similar conceptions of the moral obligation of literature to that which Brockden Brown also maintained, criticizing popular literature as “deficient” in its lack of “views into human nature and all the subtleties of reasoning”.〔 The cognomen “Speratus” was popular among contributors to periodicals and was one that Charles Brockden Brown used himself. This knowledge gives scholars reason to believe that the advertisement was written by Brown, and most tend to attribute the comments made in the advertisement to Brown rather than to the unknown Speratus. The excerpt itself was published the following week, on March 24, 1798, by James Watters, the printer who owned ''The Weekly Magazine''. Watters died of yellow fever and Sky-Walk was left with executors who refused to finish printing it due to the unreliability of its success, as Brown was a new author. The executors also set the price of the manuscript (or what was finished of it) too high for Brown to repurchase, and it was thus lost.〔Dunlap, William. ''Charles Brockden Brown.'' Pub. James P. Parke, Philadelphia, 1815.〕〔''Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-walker''. Ed. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 2006. F. Charles Brockden Brown, Elihu Hubbard Smith, William Dunlap; Dossier on ''Sky-Walk'' (March–April 1798).〕 ''Sky-Walk'' was circulated among Brockden Brown’s friends, and William Dunlap and Elihu Hubbard Smith each responded to the novel in their diaries in April 1798. From their commentary it could be gathered that ''Sky-Walk'' contained elements of somnambulism, or sleepwalking, and featured the landscape of Delaware, though whether or not it included mention of the Lenni Lenape tribe (a major concern in ''Edgar Huntly'') remains in contention 〔〔 Following the publication of the extract, a correspondent wrote to the magazine inquiring after the title of the novel. The respondent explained that, “‘Sky-Walk’ represented ‘a popular corruption of ‘Ski Wakee,’ or ''Big Spring''”, the Native American name of the Delaware setting that Brown uses in the novel. This response may indicate that Brown had at least started to develop a concern for the Lenni Lenape tribe in Sky-Walk, though it may not have been as major of a theme as it became in ''Edgar Huntly''. The only reference found for ‘Ski Wakee’ was from the Algonquian language, and the meaning was “fresh or new earth or ground”.〔 It is likely that both the correspondent and respondent were Charles Brockden Brown himself, having signed the query “A.Z.”, initials he used in other publications by ''The Weekly Magazine'' around the same time.〔 This tendency to self-promote under different cognomens supports the theory that Speratus, too, was Brockden Brown. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sky-Walk」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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