GRIN Hannappel, T: Susanna Moodie and Hector St. Jean De Crèvecoe

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Turun Yliopisto (University of Turku) (Faculty of Humanities/North American Studies Program, University of Turku), course: 20th-century Canadian Literature, 20 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: When Susanna Moodie published her autobiographic handbook "Roughing It in the Bush" in 1852, her description of life in Upper Canada (later Ontario) was intended to serve as an explicit warning for English upper class ladies considering emigration to Canada hoping to find financial success there. I remembered the novel by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur entitled Letters from an American Farmer (1782) in which he describes the same topic in the colony of Pennsylvania (later the U.S.A) - a story about immigrant life in the North American colonies. Even though the two writings deal with the same topic and were written under similar political circumstances (both writers lived in British North American Colonies when they wrote their novels) they seem to have a complete opposite perception of the new land and its chances. The goal of this paper is to outline what these differences are and how they can be linked to their cultural and literary traditions. I wish to outline how both authors define success and failure and point out similarities as well as differences. I wanted to find out if Moodie defines success in the same way Crèvecoeur does. Through putting the writings in their national context, I am hoping to discover if these concepts are typical for their national writings and zeitgeist.