William Austin, the missing man

• Autores: Philip Coleman
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 230-240
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Included in Joyce Carol Oates's Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1992), William Austin (1778-1841) nonetheless remains a largely unknown and unacknowledged figure in the development of the American short story. In part a work of cultural restitution and recovery, then, but also an expression of enthusiasm for a writer of tales that abound with contemporary significance, the primary aim of this paper is to provide a broad introduction to the work of this neglected but important writer of the early national period. It does this by briefly describing Austin's literary output, but it also attempts to describe the widespread influence that Austin had on the development of American culture, chiefly through his creation of the American archetype of Peter Rugg. In this paper this archetype is traced in texts ranging from the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and F. Scott Fitzgerald to the poetry of Amy Lowell and Robert Frost, among others. The paper concludes by suggesting that Austin's contemporary interrogations of Americanness are as relevant today as they were in the 1800s.