Washington Irving

Graded B+ at UC Riverside

To exist, a nation needs to weave its own kind of myths and legends. Those legends create deeply-rooted values through exceptionalism ; the idea of a perfect nation is born. And this is how Amer- ican literature began to speculate to imagine America, as did the New Yorker Washington Irving’s who wrote “Rip Van Winkle’’ in 1819. Rip Van Winkle could be read as a Janus-like figure because he seems to represent both the oppressed Native Americans on one hand and perhaps also the boasting and power- ful colonialist
Is Rip Van Winkle this non-normative male character who has to undergo the changes of his society, or could we read him as the violent and boasting colonialist who oppressed Native people?

This study adds significantly to what is known about Gallaudet University and issues related to race and education. It reviews the history of African American deaf students in the precollege programs on Kendall Green and then focuses specifically on attempts by black parents Louise and Luther Miller to enroll their deaf son, Kenneth, in Kendall School. After several years of frustration with Gallaudet’s administrators and with the Washington, D.C., Board of Education, in 1952 the Millers triumphed. In a decision known as Miller v. D.C. Board of Education, the U.S. District court ruled that Kendall School had to accept black students from the District of Columbia. Kendall School responded by creating separate facilities, called Division II, for African American deaf students, actively resisting integration until the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. Jowers-Barber concludes that Gallaudet, although a unique national institution, funded largely by the federal government to serve all deaf Americans, nevertheless followed the trends of the time and did not challenge prevailing racial policies.

Courtesy of Living Time™ Media International this complete publication is available to download from Academia.Edu until 31st December 2019. This short story anthology contains thirteen complete tales of horror by the following authors: Saki (H.H. Munro), W.W. Jacobs, Sir Osbert Sitwell, Washington Irving, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Guy de Maupassant, Leonid Andreyev, Jakob Sandman, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Dylan Thomas. The collection of stories ranges over all territories of horror - the uncanny, the gruesome, the supernatural, the unexplainable and the simply scream-out-loud terrifying. All of the stories are presented in their re-edited formats by LTMI™ and the collection is opened by a short introduction by Alderson Smith, Head of Publishing for Living Time™ Media International.

Washington Irving is well known as a satirist. However, his satire today appears so subtle that it is often missed. Due to this subtlety, some literary critics have misconstrued many feminist aspects of his literature as misogynistic, taking it more seriously than humorously. In the satire of his short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving mocks the relationships men and women share for amusement, not to make any sincere statements about gender. He is not misogynistic.

Tales of the supernatural have been entertaining millions of people for decades in
America. One of the first authors writing about the Gothic in America was Washington Irving
(Bendixen 34), and Rip Van Winkle as well as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are two of his
most popular tales. The Gothic made its way into American Gothic fiction during the First
Gothic Revival in Britain (Ringel 16) and climbed to record sales by 1790 (23). However, it
seems extraordinary that a young nation was obsessed with stories of “ruins and decay.”
(Hedge 91) Furthermore, the Gothic is closely entwined with questions of identity in young
America (Bendixen 31). Irving’s Sketch Book, then, reflects this identity crisis in an early
capitalist society (Antony 112) with free social mobility (Bendixen 32). This work aims to
explore the identity crisis depicted in Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
embedded in of the fantastic and the Gothic. Irving, then, expresses cultural tensions of
otherness and regional conflict by symbolic use of supernatural encounters and creating
uncertainty as to whether these are natural, after all. First, the formal requirements of the
fantastic are examined. Then follows an analysis of the themes in both stories.

Critics have systematically overlooked contributions to the realms of fantasy and imagination by Spanish artists and writers. When studying the fantastic, even the most attentive studies have been biased by predetermined expectations. While theoreticians such as Tzvetan Todorov apply a universal definition of the genre to all western literary traditions, disregarding the variety among national settings and eliding the complexity of historical contexts, prominent critics such as David Roas or Baquero Goyanes have approached the Spanish fantastic as a mere reflection of foreign models. This perspective limits the Peninsular fantastic to a position of invisibility or dependence. Contrarily, I propose to return to the complexity and diversity of historical interpretations and to contextualize the existence of alternative practices of the genre, which is characterized by the filtering of hegemonic interpretations through their notion of national identity and literary tradition.
In the introduction, I integrate the critical reaction towards the fantastic from the perspective of Spanish authors within the frame of their historical period. I systematize the English and French pathways that determined the reception of the works by Hoffmann and also trace the persistent agenda to nationalize the fantastic in the first stage of the genre between 1822 and 1860. The project of nationalization is afterwards documented through three different manifestations frequently neglected. In chapter one, I study the crucial contribution of José María Blanco White, whose reflections upon the genre even predate the first official theoretical formulation of the fantastic mode by Walter Scott. In addition, I claim that Blanco’s proposal to recover the Arabic tradition had a direct impact on subsequent authors in Spain (Jorge Montgomery, Serafín Estébanez Calderón) and abroad (Washington Irving). In chapter two, I explore the centrality of the fantastic, as defined by Walter Scott and Enrique Gil, in the development of Antonio Ros de Olano’s short non-mimetic fiction and his later reutilization of the Spanish Baroque, Cervantes and Quevedo, in the creation of his “bizarre tales” or “cuentos estrambóticos.” In chapter three, I analyze how Pedro Antonio de Alarcón offers a different strategy of nationalization of the fantastic by re-appropriating the picaresque tradition within the realm of the natural world and by linking his tale to Christian eschatology within the sphere of the supernatural. Finally, in the conclusion I reflect upon the implications and further applicability of my research, specifically from the perspective of the comparative analysis of peripheral literatures and the future of Iberian Studies.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw New York City rise from a relatively small city to the largest metropolis in North America. The changes that affected the United States, from economic to demographic to cultural, first appeared in New York. New York City was a place of change and progress. At the same time, a new concern with the history of the City and concern with preservation arose. This study will examine how the need to balance preservation with change, the need to create an identity for New York, and the need to set New York's place in the nation, were explored in the early historical discourse surrounding New York, from formal chronicles to acts of preservation.
I have examined the preservation and publication efforts of the New-York Historical Society, Washington Irving's Knickerbocker History and its affect on New York culture, local histories of New York City and State, and the controversies surrounding the removal of the City's burial grounds in order to explore these issues. Themes of civic memory, the relationship between public and private, ideas of a usable past, and the relationship between myth and history run throughout this material. The historical discourse surrounding the New York of today was shaped by the historical discourse of the early nineteenth century. (Unpublished dissertation, UCI 2002)

Este trabajo fue presentado al Congreso dedicado a la memoria de Washington Irving, celebrado en la Alhambra en 2010, siendo aceptado, pero no publicado, sin que hasta ahora la Alhambra haya sabido justificar su acción, ni dar explicaciones por lo hecho. El poder a veces se sube demasiado a la cabeza y convierte a los detentores de cargos políticos en tiranos y déspotas.

This essay examines Washington Irving's short story "Rip Van Winkle" from an autobiographical perspective by focusing on the commonality and resemblance between the author and his fictional hero. It suggests that Rip and Irving have many similar traits which underline the deeply personal and subjective dimension of the tale. It begins by considering some of these traits such as idleness, generosity and kind-heartedness. It claims that both Rip and Irving are characterized by their benevolence and altruism which account for their belovedness. After discussing these attributes, the essay focuses on other common characteristics such as the tendency to pull away from matrimony. In this matter, both Irving and Rip's possible homosexuality are considered. Although there is no clear evidence that they are homosexuals, this essay suggests that they both seem to have a repulsive attitude towards heterosexuality. The essay then concludes by examining some of the shared views and perspectives between the writer and his character. It suggests that both Irving and Rip are characterized by their aversion to politics and by their deep love of nature. Due to the numerous and striking resemblances between the fictional hero and his creator, this essay argues that Rip is a reflection of Irving's character and personality.

The paper examines the genesis and functions of the Oriental motif of Mahomet's pitcher in his perception of epilepsy. Mahomet's pitcher is one of the most remarkable Oriental images, representing the specificity of Dostoevsky's Orientalism. In his works this image appears explicitly in The Idiot (1868) and Demons (1871-1872), implicitly in his notebooks of 1864s-1865s years, and as a hidden motif in the image of Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), which, without doubts, is indicative of a well-established literary motif. The main sources for this motif were Mahomet and His Successors (1849) by W. Irving in the Russian translation of 1857, Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre (1843), by G. Weil, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) by T. Carlyle. The underlying source for the motif complex of epilepsy, Mahomet and the epiphany of existence in Russian literature was A. Pushkin's poem The Prophet (1826). In this paper the author makes an assumption about the proximity between the images of Mahomet and the persona in The Prophet in terms of epilepsy literary reception, which was very important for Dostoevsky. The most important function of this motif is that of identification. In its turn, it determines the others: narrative (participation in the development of storylines), intertextual (linking with other Dostoevsky's works and Russia, Oriental and Western literary traditions), philosophical (a new look at the spatial-temporal organization of the world) and ethical (participation in solving the problem of true and false statements).

This reading of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) shows how literature works outside of referential concerns; it concludes by considering ethics in the uncanny.  At the legend’s core lies the question of Ichabod’s disappearance: does it represent a prank by a romantic rival or the predations of an actual headless horseman?  This question draws its unsettling power, as I show, from Sleepy Hollow’s history on the front lines of the revolutionary war.  The storytelling around Ichabod’s vanishing thus serves as a proxy for the dire, uncanny question: what’s the difference between those who survived the trauma of the war (like Ichabod’s neighbors) and those whose bodies and lives were shattered by that event (like the headless soldier)?  The conclusion follows Freud’s hint that uncanny reminds one of a debt to be paid and proposes an ethical obligation to speak, to bear witness, and to pay in words on an obscure debt.

En este artículo, me propongo exponer brevemente cómo la nacionalización del género fantástico se filtró no solo por medio de las leyendas de origen andalusí, sino también a través de traducciones “traidoras” como la que Jorge Montgomery elaboró en su colección Tareas de un solitario, que publicó de manera anónima en 1829. En concreto prestaré atención al relato “El serrano de la Alpujarra” el cual reformula en clave morisca el famoso cuento “Rip Van Winkle” de Washington Irving , que narra el retorno a la sociedad de un perezoso jornalero tras un largo sueño de más de veinte años. Como documenta Castañeda, el epistolario del neoyorquino refleja que en febrero de 1828 este ya tenía constancia de la versión morisca de su relato de manos de Jorge Montgomery (Letters II 129, citado por Castañeda). El dato importa, ya que anticipa en meses el viaje de Irving a Granada y la redacción de Tales of the Alhambra que comienza en verano de ese mismo año; nos sitúa ante una traición translaticia, la de Montgomery, que se anticipa a la famosa colección del escritor norteamericano. En un redireccionamiento del eje de influencia, el traductor-traidor se nos presenta como inspiración posible del autor traducido.

Resumo do "paper" apresentado no III Seminário Internacional Mundos Ibéricos.
Na primeira metade do século XIX a fortaleza da Alhambra abrigava uma curiosa variedade de moradores: soldados inativos por invalidez, ciganos, pessoas pobres, mas também artistas e escritores estrangeiros atraídos pela aura de exotismo do local, que fascinava toda uma geração de Românticos. O historiador, diplomata e escritor Washington Irving (1783-1859) juntou-se aos habitantes da Alhambra instalando-se em seu interior temporariamente, em 1829. Escreveu, então, a partir de sua experiência local, um livro que veio a fazer grande sucesso, Tales of the Alhambra. A análise do texto de Irving, por um lado revela os ecos da Espanha islâmica presentes no imaginário orientalista do século XIX mas, por outro, conduz também ao mundo real da Alhambra oitocentista e aos personagens com os quais o autor conviveu. Numa espécie de diálogo entre épocas distintas, há uma recuperação de histórias e estórias fantásticas do passado islâmico através de relatos que vinham sendo transmitidos pelos moradores da região. Neste sentido, o registro se constitui em uma fonte relevante para a pesquisa histórica já que Washington Irving resgatou fatos e lendas sobre os muçulmanos que se tornaram parte importante da memória local do antigo reino de Granada.

Rip Van Winkle es un relato singular desde un punto de vista formal, pues cuenta con un prólogo y un epígrafe, y al finalizar el relato con una nota que cita a Dietrich Knickerbocker y un postscriptum del mismo enunciador que el prólogo. En Palimpsestos, G. Genette denomina a estas secciones –junto con el título- paratextos, esto es, aquellos elementos “que procuran un entorno (variable) al texto” y que tienen una relación menos explícita y más distante con “el texto propiamente dicho” (Genette, 1962: 11).
La cuestión que se nos presenta, basándonos en las palabras de G.Genette, es: el prólogo, la nota, el postscriptum ¿realmente pueden ser considerados como paratextos propiamente dichos?
¿En qué modificaría al relato la eliminación de dichos elementos? El presente trabajo apuntará a un esclarecimiento de esta cuestión, la que, creemos está en correlato con la relación entre verdad, Historia y el desarrollo de una literatura nacional en correspondencia con el proceso de la formación de una Nación.

By courtesy of Living Time™ Media International, this is the complete publication of 'Future Past and Other Premonitions', a short story anthology containing ten stories of prophecy, foresight and the supernatural. It brings together an eclectic mix of authors - Lafcadio Hearn, Saki (H.H. Munro), H.G. Wells, Guy de Maupassant, Washington Irving, E.M. Forster, W.W. Jacobs, Stefan Zeromski, Daniel Defoe and Edouard d'Araille - and the subject matter of the stories, although united by a common thread, is just as varied as its writers. 'Premonition' is explored in the widest sense of the term - predictions of the future, visions of new eras, foresight supernatural - and the volume does not claim to define or exhaust the meaning of this word with the stories that are presented. This volume will be available on Academia.Edu until the 31st December 2019, after which point only a sampler edition will be available. There is a brief introduction by the Head of Publishing for LTMI™, Mr. Alderson Smith. This is the 2nd Edition of 'Future Past' (1st Edition published 2002).

Washington Irving was the father of American literature. He was the one of the representatives of American Romanticism and declared himself as a man of letters. Irving served as the bridge between America and Europe during his life. It should be the importance of the author and his works in the formation, initiation and continuation of American literature. This paper investigates the role of American author Washington Irving and his popular works in the terms of historical background of America during 18 th and 19 th centuries. It tries to show influences of wars of the time, such as the War of Independence and the War of 1812 which is known as the Second War of Independence, as well as, European culture, traditions and literature on Irving's works, especially in his well-known short stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". The economic factors of the time also affected Irving to create his characters, such as Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, because in that period there was economic and political growth in America and this fact didn't pass without effect on Irving and his writing.

στο: Σ.Ν. Φιλιππίδης (επιμ.), Ο Καζαντζάκης  τον 21ο αιώνα, Πρακτικά του Διεθνούς Συνεδρίου «Καζαντζάκης 2007: Πενήντα χρόνια μετά» (Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης, 18-21 Μαΐου 2007), Ηράκλειο, Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης - Εκδόσεις Φιλοσοφικής Σχολής Πανεπιστημίου Κρήτης, 2010, σ. 271-290.

IRVING, W. (2012). El Gran Prior de Menorca. Una auténtica historia de fantasmas.
The Grand Prior of Minorca. A veritable ghost story. Sobradiel: 2012.
70 Páginas con 3 Ilustraciones en color y B/N. Idioma: Castellano/English. PVP: 10,00 €
ISBN: 9788496810266

"(...)It would be tempting to conclude that what the manifesto was for the avant-garde,  the artist agreement/contract was for conceptual art(...)

The genealogy of the manifesto in the arts can be traced back to political proclamations – documents which put forth an agenda of certain political programs and goals. This is not surprising as artists and intellectuals have been increasingly involved in political affairs since the 19th century. Agitating for political/artistic claims was therefore a natural process embraced by avant-garde artists who arguably inaugurated the use of manifestos in the arts. Art manifestos have become so important that the avant-garde was canonized largely relying on the self-identification scriptural practices of different artistic groups expressing their programs and goals. For example, Alfred Barr’s famous 1936 diagram for the MoMA exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art,” which presented the development of modern art in the West, singled out several early modernist and avant-garde movements, at least half of which were self-identified groups around their respective manifestos.
Even though they were developed from the rhetoric of social and political agitation, the proclamations espoused in art manifestos have been largely embraced by the art world – perhaps as a consequence of their straightforward way of address. Indeed, art manifestos have come to be more commonly perceived as art ephemera or as art works in and of themselves, rather than operative ideas to be put into practice in order to achieve certain goals. To be sure the manifesto reflects individual or group agendas of what the art world and even the world is and what it should become, often using agitational rhetoric to prescribe future developments. 
Approximately at the same time as the art manifesto emerged, a different type of textual promotion of artistic practices arose in the context of the Russian avant-garde. In line with the ideals of the 1917 Russian revolution, Kazimir Malevich drafted one of the earliest documents dealing with artists rights entitled “Deklaratsiya prav khudozhnika: Zhizn’ khudozhnika” (Artists Rights Declaration: The Artist’s Life) published in Anarchya (Anarchy) in June 1918. Oriented towards art as labor and artists as workers, Malevich’s text defines artistic practice in the context of the legal and economic frameworks at play after the art work leaves the possession of its producer. This type of agreement, even though in many ways similarly utopian in its goals as the art manifesto, was nonetheless grounded in a
legal rhetoric. "

Resumo Se a produção literária é, de fato, sintomática de sua cultura vernácula, o que a misoginia nas obras mais célebres de Washington Irving tem a revelar sobre os primeiros americanos? O objetivo da presente investigação é sistematizar estruturalmente e discutir, de maneira introdutória, a descrição das personagens Katrina Van Tassel e sua mãe, a Sra. Van Tassel, na obra The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Os reflexos históricos, culturais, teóricos e bio/bibliográficos explorados informam as fundações que servem de base para a ...

Joseph Brodsky in his work “Dall’esilio” mentions that the reader of a literary
work is doomed to an interpretative role… 1 Thus, we as critical readers are “convicted” to make
a textual interpretation of the short story “Rip Van Winkle”, written by American author
Washington Irving. The present essay investigates the symbolic analysis of the text, as well as
the analysis of the protagonist Rip Van Winkle as an archetypal character of the Homer’s
Odyssey. These are the two outlines on which our essay is constructed, from which we will
discover and analyze other topics such as the mixture of cultures or the need of creating an
American myth. At this point we will treat the myth as a sign of the birth of a culture.
According to our interpretation, the myth of the American Odyssey will be a signifier of the
birth of the American Myth. Thus, Washington Irving creates the character of Rip Van
Winkle out of the need to formulate/create an American Culture of its kind.

La “belleza de cadalso”, que con tanta agudeza estética describe Jean Lorrain en M. de Phocas (1901), surge durante el Terror, se pone de moda tras la caída de Robespierre, y se activa literariamente después de las jornadas revolucionarias de julio de 1830 conocidas como las Tres Gloriosas. Este aplazamiento vuelve tangible cuán estrechamente vinculadas se hallan las obras de la literatura a los acontecimientos políticos, y más aún aquellas que los representan mediante la fantasía y la mistificación. Tal es el caso de una buena parte de la producción del romanticismo frenético.

La Femme au collier de velours recupera y expande la “belleza de cadalso” de sus antecesoras termidorianas. Esta femme fatale, reviniente o muerta viva, combina hasta el paroxismo el amor y el horror, la lujuria y la muerte, y debe su existencia, como mostramos aquí, no tanto a las ejecuciones que inundaron de sangre París durante el Terror, cuanto a las criaturas de Hoffmann, a los relatos de los bals des victimes y, sobre todo, a “Gottfried Wolfgang” (1843), la versión francesa firmada por Pétrus Borel del cuento de Washington Irving, “The Adventure of the German Student” (1824).



Ponencia presentada en las XXX Jornadas de la Asociación Argentina de Literatura Francesa y Francófona, La Plata, Universidad de La Plata, 11-13 de mayo de 2017.

Herman Melville’s first published story, “Fragments from a Writing Desk” (1839; released in two parts in the Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser), reimagines nineteenth-century American narratives of disabled female figures. In the first installment, Melville’s amorous narrator, L.A.V., quotes extensively from British romantic books of beauty, anthologies that gathered the best works from famous authors. In the second, Melville critiques L.A.V.’s exuberant citations, cultivating an alternative aesthetic we term “silent eloquence.” This essay argues that Melville’s early diptych reimagines deformed texts and disabled bodies by means of a deaf woman called “Inamorata.” Inspired by emergent deaf American communities, institutions, and forms of expression, and literary works by an array of deaf and hearing writers from James Nack and John R. Burnet to Washington Irving and Sarah Josepha Hale, Melville’s first fiction presents an early account of the communicative power of difference. Inamorata’s various, artful modes of expression—handwriting, signing, gestures, and expressions—put literary beauties and disabled bodies in conversation. Presenting nineteenth-century American readers with a new aesthetic vocabulary, “Fragments” simultaneously anticipates aspects of Melville’s major works and develops a concept of beauty capable of encompassing multiple senses, modes of address, experiences, and ways of knowing

Desde el momento de fundación del género gótico, con la recuperación (pre)romántica de la estética medieval, los castillos han sido uno de los espacios privilegiados para el terror y lo sobrenatural. Particularmente, los castillos situados en países del Sur y el Este de Europa (España, Italia, Rumanía), es decir, en la Europa católica, meridional y "periférica", aquella a la que los viajeros románticos (en especial británicos) viajaban para acercarse a un "Otro" extraño, pero próximo. En este artículo tomaremos como punto de partida para la reflexión el volumen The Alhambra (1832) de Washington Irving, en particular el fragmento "The author's chamber / The mysterious chambers", para reflexionar sobre el cruce entre la narrativa de viajes y el relato gótico, analizando el lugar que el espacio juega en la configuración de ambos géneros. Abstract: From the founding moment of the gothic genre, with the (pre)Romantic recovery of medieval imagery, castles have been one of the privileged spaces for terror and the supernatural; particularly, castles located in Southern and Eastern Europe (Spain, Italy, Romania), i.e., in a Catholic, Southern and "peripheric" Europe, one that 1 El presente trabajo es resultado de las investigaciones sobre la relación entre espacialidad y literatura desarrolladas en el contexto del proyecto "Mapa Digital das Relações Literárias Ibéricas (1870-1930)", financiado por la Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [IF/00838/2014].

This is a Japanese translation of the Introduction of A Tour on the Prairies written by Washington Irving, translated and annotated by Naruhiko Mikado, a Bachelor of Arts.
The author translated it for the purpose of helping Japanese freshmen in college intent upon studying English literature familiarize themselves with the original text of the classics, therefore the translated text is fairly verbatim.