Lucky for us, its organizers, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, both affiliated with Louisiana State University, have now compiled the conference’s undelivered papers in Rip Van Winkle’s Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory. But then covid came along, and the event was canceled. The bicentennial of the publication was to be commemorated in 2020 with a full-on academic conference. The stories most remembered, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” were included in a collection titled “The Sketch Book,” published serially by Irving in 1819-1820 under the nom de plume Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
But once a “cherished literary figure,” Irving - if not his two most famous tales - is largely forgotten in the wider world today. Though long gone, the author is inescapable as a posthumous presence in the Hudson Valley. (Halloween, naturally, is the hamlet’s biggest holiday.) Children here attend Sleepy Hollow Elementary School Irving (1783-1859) is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. In Ulster Park, some nine miles south of the campground, there’s Headless Horseman Haunted Attractions, which includes hayrides and the ethereal equestrian’s “tomb.”įarther downriver, a village even changed its name from North Tarrytown to Sleepy Hollow to brand itself as the setting for Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” featuring the aforementioned Headless Horseman. About 15 miles north, the Rip Van Winkle Bridge spans the Hudson, with a walkway that offers stunning river views. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.Between the Catskills and the Hudson River, Rip Van Winkle Campground offers $40-a-night tent sites and $135-a-night cabins. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is relieved rather than anything more dramatic. If Dame Van Winkle is like Old Mother England, lording it over Rip (representing the American colonies), then her death is a blessed release for Rip, but nothing more momentous than that. The humour of the story – chiefly in Rip Van Winkle being a henpecked husband – also supports this analysis of the story. Rip’s son is his ‘ditto’, or spitting image: the next generation is much the same as the last.
The name of the pub may have changed – to represent the shift from one George to another, from King George to George Washington – but life for these simple villagers is largely the same as it was before. When he gets back to his village, although several of his friends have died – one presumably in the war itself – the others have survived, and he soon goes back to sitting and gossiping with them outside of the pub where they used to chatter together. Rip Van Winkle manages to sleep right through it, which is quite a feat when you think about what a noise there must have been. One interpretation is that Irving, through this light-hearted tale, is actually trying to downplay the American Revolution. Why did Irving recycle this old plot device for his story about the American Revolution? And how should we interpret the story?
Like Irving’s story, it features a man from a simple village who discovers some strange men drinking in the woods like Irving’s story, the hero falls asleep after partaking of their drink, and, like Irving’s story, he wakes up to find twenty years have passed. But the clearest influence was Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal’s German folktale ‘Peter Klaus’.
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