Washington Irving's Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836) and Peter Stark's Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire. A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier (2014): A Comparative Study
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Date
2023
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Publisher
Mouloud Mammeri University
Abstract
This is a comparative study that sought to examine the different parallels between Washington Irving’s Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1890) and Peter Stark’s Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire. A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier (2015). To conduct this study, we relied on Julia Kristeva’s Intertextuality and some of its pertinent concepts like ambivalence and transposition as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism. This dissertation was divided into three major chapters. In the first chapter, we examined the historical and literary contexts, uncovering that both Irving and Stark recount the same historical events, drawing from similar primary sources such as journals and travelogues. The second chapter dealt with themes like ambition, overcoming adversity, perseverance, and the idea of Manifest Destiny. These themes, deeply rooted in both narratives, are shown to be interconnected and central to the respective authors’ interpretations of the Astoria project. The third chapter focused on the divergences in discourse, style and major characters’ traits.
Description
70p. ; 30cm(+CD-Rom)
Keywords
Astoria, intertextuality, Manifest Destiny, orientalism, racism, westward expansion
Citation
Literature and Civilization