英美文学选读学习笔记 Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was one of the first American writers to earn an international reputation, and regarded as an early Romantic writer in the American literary history and Father of the American short stories.

Washington Irving was born in New York City, the youngest of eleven children of a wealthy merchant. From a very early age he began to read widely and write juvenile poems, essays, and plays. In 1798, he concluded his education at private schools and entered a law office, but he loved writing more. In the years between 1802 and 1803, Irving contributed several letters under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle" to The Morning Chronicle, a newspaper edited by his brother Peter, and these letters were published in 1803 as The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle Gent., a series of youthful satires on New York society. Irving, as Oldstyle, fashioned a style which reduces all to foolishness, including the author's persona. Five years later he joined with a brother and with his friends in another such series, Salmagundi, which commented on the phenomena of the day like waltzing, tea-drinking, and feminine nudity. His contributions were signed "Anthony Evergreen."

Irving's hope, plan and dreams came to a crashing halt after the loss of his only love, Mitilda Hoffman, yet he found his refuge from the grief in the researches on A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which, written under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great success and won him wide popularity after it came out in 1809. The book is a parody of the Dutch colony, in which Irving ridicules the human activity by combining true history with imagination, with a good deal of reference to contemporary events and personalities, particularly political ones. With the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in serials between 1819 and 1820, Irving won a measure of international fame on both sides of the Atlantic. The book contains familiar essays on the English life and Americanized versions of European folk tales like "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Geoffrey Crayon is a carefully contrived persona and behind Crayon stands Irving, juxtaposing the Old World and the New, and manipulating his own antiquarian interest with artistic perspectives.

Following The Sketch Book, Irving published Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveler (1824), both of which lacked the creative energy and appeal of The Sketch Book. In 1826, he was sent to Spain as an American attache; he was secretary of the United States Legation in London from 1829 to 1832; later on he made an adventurous trip to the Western frontier on horseback and wrote three books, which celebrated the adventure of exploring the West and the possibilities of developing it. Irving spent the rest of his life in "Sunnyside", his home on the Hudson River, except for a period of four years when he was away from home as Minister to Spain, living a life of leisure and comfort. During these years Irving never stopped writing, yet none of them' could acclaim the same admiration and recognition The Sketch Book did.

Irving's relationship with the Old World in terms of his literary imagination can hardly be ignored considering his success both abroad and at home. A History of New York is a patchwork of references, echoes, and burlesques. He parodies or imitates Homer, Cervantes, Fielding, Swift and many other favorites of his. He was also absorbed in what he called "the rich mine of German Literature'' and got ideas from German legends for two of his famous stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The Alhambra (1832) is usually regarded as Irving's "Spanish Sketch Book" simply because it has a strong flavor of Spanish culture. Most of the thirty-three essays in The Sketch Book were written in England, filled with English scenes and quotations from English authors and faithful to British orthography. Washington Irving brought to the new nation what its people desired most in a man of letters --the respect of the Old World. However exotic his tales are, everyone who reads "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" will know instantly that they are among the treasures of the American language and culture. These two stories easily trigger off American imagination with their focus on American subjects, American landscape, and, in Irving's case, the legends of the Hudson River region of the fresh young land. It is not the sketches about the Old World but the tales about America that made Washington Irving a household word and his fame enduring.

But Irving's taste was essentially conservative. Like the two famous personae he created, Diedrich Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon, Irving remained a conservative and always exalted a disappearing past. This social conservatism and literary ference for the past is revealed, to some extent, in his famous story "Rip Van Winkle." The story is a tale remembered mostly for Rip's 20-year sleep, set against the background of the inevitably changing America. In the story Irving skillfully sents to us paralleled juxtapositions of two totally different worlds before and after Rip's 20 years' sleep. By moving Rip back and forth from a noisy world with his wife on the farm to a wild but peaceful natural world in the mountains, and from a -Revolution village to a George Washington era, Irving describes Rip's response and reaction in a dramatic way, so that we see clearly both the narrator and Irving agree on the ferability of the past to the sent, and the ferability of a dream-like world to the real one.

Washington Irving has always been regarded as a writer who "perfected the best classic style that American Literature ever produced.” We get a strong sense imssion as we read him along, since the language he used best reveals what a Romantic writer can do with words. We hear rather than read, for there is musicality in almost every line of his prose. We seldom learn a moral lesson because he wants us amused and relaxed. So we often find ourselves lost in a world that is permeated with a dreaming quality. The Gothic elements and the supernatural atmosphere are manipulated in such a way that we could become so engaged and involved in what is happening in a seemingly exotic place. Yet Irving never forgets to associate a certain place with the inward movement of a person and to charge his sentences with emotion so as to create a true and vivid character. He is worth the honor of being "the American Goldsmith" for his literary craftsmanship.

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