On Western Waters: Anglo-American Nonfictional Narrative in the Nineteenth Century

Anglo-American westward expansion provided a major impulse to the development of the young United States' narrative tradition. Early U.S. writers also looked to the South, that is, to the Spanish New World and, in some cases, to Spain itself. Washington Irving's "A History of the Life...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass.) Mass.), 2012-01, Vol.141 (1), p.61-75
Main Author:	Adorno, Rolena
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1600-1699 1800-1899 American culture American identity American literature biography Business Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Chivalry Clemens, Samuel Cultural history Don Quixote English History Irving, Washington Language history Life on the Mississippi Literary history Literature Narrative history Narratives Nonfiction novel prose Quijote(1605, 1615) Spanish Spanish history Spanish literature The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus Travel United States history Valleys White people Writers Written narratives
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Summary:	Anglo-American westward expansion provided a major impulse to the development of the young United States' narrative tradition. Early U.S. writers also looked to the South, that is, to the Spanish New World and, in some cases, to Spain itself. Washington Irving's "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus" (1828), the first full-length biography of the admiral in English, inaugurated the trend, and Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" (1883) transformed it by focusing on the life and lives of the Mississippi River Valley and using an approach informed by Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quijote de la Mancha." From Irving's "discovery of America" to Twain's tribute to the disappearing era of steamboat travel and commerce on the Mississippi, the tales about "western waters," told via their authors' varied engagements with Spanish history and literature, constitute a seldom acknowledged dimension in Anglo-America's nonfictional narrative literary history.
ISSN:	0011-5266 1548-6192 1548-6192