On Satire Of Washington Irving's Fictions

Washington Irving, the first American writer enjoying the international reputation and also a representative of American Romanticists in early American literary history, won the great title of"Father of American Literature."His works range from the fantastic tales to the serious historical biographies. The readers across the Atlantic were most fascinated by his English literary manner and the beautiful American setting in his imaginative fictions, and by the artistic and elegant qualities in Irving's works, as well as its satire which appears genial or ungentle. These qualities have raised American literature to a place in the world's literature. Irving helps to discover"real America"and he caricatures the ridiculous aspects of American life: materialism, complacency and smugness with his remarkable satirical essays. He is a detached observer and commentator of the rather panoramic life of his time; he is a satirist, critic and judge of that age with his unique feature. His achievements in satire started with the two satiric works, Salmagundi (1807) and the History of New York (1809), but two American legends Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow collected in The Sketch Book (1819-1820), the sustained and more mature satire, are undoubtedly the most striking ones.Irving's other legends with American background are mainly collected in the fourth part of Tales of a Traveler. Through transplanting the European folklore to American land, Irving created American legends, but this method is often regarded as a severe imitation of European literature. By analyzing the legends'artistic features, this thesis tries to reveal that Irving's legend is not a mere imitation, which he uses as the source and treatment of his satire to reflect a series of changes and conflicts in American society from the end of the Revolution to the 1820s, with the aim to lampoon them through various means. The thesis also explores how Washington Irving applies different techniques to achieve his satirical effect and convey his purposes in satirical aspect.The content of the thesis is divided into four parts. The introduction gives an overview of the critical responses to Washington Irving and his works from two perspectives, reviewing his literary career and introducing his masterpieces. The first chapter deals with the issue of how Washington Irving deserves of being a satirist. The second provides an analysis of his treatments of satire by applying the theory, concerning the two main elements:"ironic perspective on the historical subject and parodic borrowing of a literary form,"for satiric frame of mind proposed by Charles A. Knight. The third and fourth chapters respectively discuss the satirical techniques in the two remarkable legends.