Irving, Washington. (1783 - 1859).
L i f e
- born the yearn the Revolutionary War ended, named after its most prominent hero
- received little formal education x but: absorbed more enduring education from the city’s streets, and from merchant and seamen’s homespun tales
W o r k
- associated with the Knickerbocker School
- a lifelong tension between the literary nationalism x the European culture
- neo-classical in style x but: employs humour, and a half-Romantic sensibility, melancholy, and the picturesque
N Y P h a s e :
- treats directly and often satirically the absence of American cultural traditions
- his first published writing: a series of essays satirising the American political, social, and literary provincialism
Salmagundi (1807):
- a series of pamphlets in the spirit of the Knickerbocker School
- an intellectual mixture of social criticism, literary reviews, latest trends in politics and the theatre, and self-parody at the same time
History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809):
- a burlesque parody of the methods of contemporary historians and of the short American history
- concern: the New York's Dutch colonial history
E u r o p e a n P h a s e :
- a sense of dislocation <=> parallel to the later ‘Lost Generation’
- an urgent need to establish a specifically American historical context
The Sketch Book (1819):
- adapts the European local histories and legends to American settings
=> helped to develop a short story
“Rip Van Winkle”:
- the first American tale, based on a German legend
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”:
- an American rendition of European folk tale
History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828):
- Columbus’s fate like his own = torn between the Old World and the New
U S P h a s e :
A Tour on the Prairies (1835):
< his own experience of the tour through the American South and West
- shifts from a detached cynicism and reserve to the direct authorial participation
= established a distinctively American identity for himself and secured the legitimacy of American authorship
F i n a l P h a s e :
Life of George Washington (1855 - 1859):
- a massive 5-volume biography, a prose epic
- Washington’s life = an instructive paradigm for America to re-create a distinguished past
Basics
(Portrait: Mathew Brady. Source: Wikipedia Commons).
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Author
Washington Irving. (1783 - 1859). American. -
Work
Short story writer. Prose writer. Author of "Rip Van Winkle". -
Genres
Romanticism. Satire. Humour.
Literature
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994.
McQuade, Donald, gen.ed. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper & Collins, 1996.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.
His Short Stories
“Peter the Headstrong” (1809)
“The Christmas Dinner” (1820)
“Westminster Abbey” (1820)
“Christmas Eve” (1820)
Quote
"A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use".
From "Rip Van Winkle" (1819).