SOURCE: “Washington Irving's Great Enterprise: Exploring American Values in the Western Writings” in Making America/Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, edited by A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, Rodopi, 1996, pp. 199-220.

In the following essay, Harding probes Irving's complex relationship with Western expansion as evident in A Tour on the Prairies, Astoria, and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.

When Irving returned to the United States in 1832, after an absence of seventeen years, he may have been shocked by the vulgarity of the “commonplace civilization” he found there¹ but he was certainly impressed by the immense vigor of the nation's economic life, particularly as that vigor manifested itself in westward expansion. To the man whose nightmare was of finding himself a lonely relic of a past age in his native city,² the America to which he returned was a country where everyone spoke of the future “with...