Washington Irving

Rip Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle:

'foolish, well-oiled disposition, who takes the world easy'.

Kaatskills: evokes vivid sense of place like a traveller's tale

Dietrich Knickerbocker

'an old gentleman of new York, who was very curious in the Dutch history of the province and the manners of the descendants from its primitive settlers.'

Important: story opens during reign of George III before the War of Independence. America is under British rule.

What is the meaning?

'Don't be lazy'?

'Don't get drunk and pass out'?

'Don't tell tales'?

**The meaning of this tale is unclear and ambiguous**

Postscript: both emphasises strangeness and confirms historical validity

LOOK AT:

• the function of the preface and postscript
• narrative framing

Washington Irving

1783-1859

• Did he steal European tales?
• Or did he rework them to speak to the conditions of post-Revolutionary America?

• Named after George Washington
• Popular in America and England
• Diplomatic roles in England and Spain
• 'bridge[d] the chasm between two great nations' (William Bryant)

• Wide range of writings
• Best known for tales and folklore
• Sketchbook 1819-20
• Persona of Geoffrey Crayon
• 'To teach and delight'

Who are Americans?

Early National or Post Revolutionary Period: Late C18th to early C19th

Why a sketchbook?

1. American Literature and the 'new' America

• Population = 3 million
• English, German, Dutch, French, Scandinavian
• Planters, farmers, merchants and shipbuilders
• No aristocracy or kings
• 1/3 population = black slaves and white servants

• Sketches vs Novels
• Travellers tales
• Ideological positioning
• Ambiguity
• Vehicles for national identity
• Stories have a role in creating nations
• Encompass reason and imagination

Imagination

Social Issues

Twain

Key point: Irving's tales have dual role to entertain and instruct

Poe

Hawthorne

Irving thought that reason when separated from imagination is barren and unfeeling; imagination divorced from reason is deceptive and untrustworthy.

Douglass

Irving

Whitman

Stowe

• America is a 'new' country
• War of Independence/Revolutionary War against the British, 1775-1783
• Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

PICTURESQUE vs GOTHIC

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Poe

• Darker themes
• Untrustworthy narrators
• Threatening landscapes

Irving

• Old-style narrator
• Refined/polite writing
• Quirky tales

13 original American States

Grand union flag

representing 13 colonies

• What is American Literature?
• Who/what is an American?

American ways of seeing

Changed in 1777 when

stars represented 13 states

RELIGION

FAITH

PIOUS

GOOD DEEDS

CHARITY

NATURAL SIN

SCIENCE

REASON

LOGIC

KNOWLEDGE

PROGRESS

NATURAL GOODNESS

First capital in Philadelphia

Moved to Washington DC in 1790

AM1002 CLASSIC US TEXTS

American reading and writing

Lecture 1:

1949 Disney version:

American Visions (1997)

• Fewer than 100 books of American origin 1776-1792
• Puritans: reading for pleasure = heresy
• Books were DIDACTIC: they told a moral lesson
• Very few American books widely read

Robert Hughes

Washington Irving

LECTURE STRUCTURE

1. American Literature and the 'new' America

3. The Sketch Book

2. Washington Irving

4. 'Rip Van Winkle'

5. Sleepy Hollow

6. Irving and the Critics

'Rip Van Winkle'

'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'

(1819-20)

Meaning?

• Tale of love and rivalry
• Tale of greed and property

Mode:

• Would it only be a Gothic tale if the Headless Horseman existed?
• If the horseman is a stunt then is the story 'picturesque'?

Irving's Reputation

Film:

Tim Burton's film develops it as a fully blown gothic tale

LOOK AT: the postscript which sketches out the tensions between a true tale that tells a moral lesson and a strange tale that defies explanation.

• Celebrity in his lifetime
• Well read in C19th and praised by Walter Scott and Lord Byron
• Reputation declined after the Civil War - dismissed as sentimental, artificial and antiquated
• The darker fiction of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne was more appealing to C20th writers
• Criticised by feminists for stereotyping women in 'The Wife' and 'The Broken Heart'
• Recently reappraised as a forerunner of American Gothic and imaginative fiction

‘There is a recurrent tendency in American writing, and in the observation of American history, to identify crisis as a descent from innocence to experience: but the crisis changes, the moment of descent has been located at a number of different times in the national narrative, most of them associated with war.’

Richard Gray After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)