Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
art should not be required to teach a lesson—Hawthorne compared making it do
so to sticking a pin through a buttery—is a luxury of which not all writers could
partake. Slave narratives, such as those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs,
depicted common experiences of slaves, aimed to teach a lesson about the evils of
slavery, and hoped to have real world results. Similarly, woman’s ction—sometimes
called sentimental or domestic ction—often revealed the vulnerability of women
to unscrupulous relatives and suitors and sought to question the domestic sphere
to which women were conned or to compel greater respect for the work women
did within it. Though these works are less familiar to modern readers, these were
some of the most popular genres for nineteenth century readers and represent the
vast majority of what Americans actually read during this period.
4.3 WASHINGTON IRVING
(1783–1859)
Washington Irving honed his
writing craft early and in various
ways. The youngest of eleven children,
Irving grew up in New York City in a
prosperous merchant family. He was
an avid and comprehensive reader,
enjoying the periodical essay (a fairly
new genre), the plays of Shakespeare,
and the sentimentalist works of Oliver
Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne. For his
brothers’ entertainment, he wrote essays
on the theater, using the pseudonym of
Jonathan Oldstyle.
Irving studied law and in 1806 was
admitted to the New York bar but he still
fullled his literary bent. Also in 1806,
he, his brother William, and James Kirke
Image 4.1 | Washington Irving
Paulding, a relative through marriage, Artist | John Wesley Jarvis
Source | Wikimedia Commons
founded Salmagundi; or, The Whimwhams
and Opinions of Launcelot
License | Public Domain
Langsta, Esq. Others. A hodge-podge of sorts, it satirized New York society in
essays and poems. Irving expanded his scope in A History of New-York (1809),
using the persona of Diedrich Knickerbock to turn a more serious history of New
York (1807) by Samuel Latham Mitchill on its head with humor and hilarious wit.
After the War of 1812, Irving traveled to Europe, where he remained based in
England for the next seventeen years. The failure of his brother’s hardware import
rm in 1818 freed Irving to focus on his writing, spurred by the great novelist Sir
Walter Scott (1771–1832). Scott, whose writing took an almost anthropological
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