-Wieland

A Gothic romance told in the epistolary style, this novel is considered to be one of the genre’s first American publications. The imagined estate of the Wieland family, Mettingen, is located on a river outside of Philadelphia and is most notable for the temple built by the German immigrant Wieland. In the Gothic tradition, Wieland dies mysteriously by spontaneous combustion in his temple. His children, who inherit the estate, are eventually visited by a strange traveler named Carwin, who drives Wieland’s son insane through the use of ventriloquism.