"Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving
The Short Story Genre
It is a brief imaginative narrative, unfolding a single predominating incident and a single chief character; it contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed, and the whole treatment so organized as to produce a single impression.
The short story is the best suited literary form to the American life and character.
American Romanticism
· The Romantic Period in the history of American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War, which started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
· In this period, a new emphasis was placed upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature, a liking for the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational, the supernatural and remote past was fostered, and an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters was paid, and above all, the individual and the common man was exalted.
· Dr. F. H. Hedge, an American transcendentalist, thought the essence of romanticism was aspiration, having its origin in wonder and mystery.
· Among the aspects of the "romantic" movement in England may be listed as a) sensibility; b) primitivism; c) love of nature; d) sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; e) mysticism; and f) individualism.
Washington Irving, (born April 3, 1783, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 28, 1859, Tarrytown, New York), writer called the “first American man of letters.” He is best known for the short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”
He wrote a series of whimsically satirical essays over the signature of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., published in Peter Irving’s newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, in 1802–03. He made several trips up the Hudson, another into Canada for his health, and took an extended tour of Europe in 1804–06.
His The History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) was a comic history of the Dutch regime in New York, prefaced by a mock-pedantic account of the world from creation onward.
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20), is a collection of stories and essays that mix satire and whimsicality with fact and fiction. Most of the book’s 30-odd pieces concern Irving’s impressions of England, but six chapters deal with American subjects. Of these, the tales “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” have been called the first American short stories. They are both Americanized versions of German folktales. The main character of “Rip Van Winkle” is a henpecked husband who sleeps for 20 years and awakes as an old man to find his wife dead, his daughter happily married, and America now an independent country. The tremendous success of The Sketch Book in both England and the United States assured Irving that he could live by his pen. In 1822 he produced Bracebridge Hall, a sequel to The Sketch Book. He traveled in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the British Isles, and later in his own country.
The major themes of the story have to do with the status of America as a free nation. Before he fell asleep America was a colony under the control of the tyrannical rule of Great Britain. The period of his sleep was the period of the revolution and during the post-revolution period he went back to his country and his people to find his wife dead (who could be read as a symbol of the British control) and talks of freedom and democracy which were new to him. The descriptions of nature reveal the ideals of escapism and isolation which are favoured by the romantic authors. Rip found happiness and peace in nature, he felt safe from the clamours of his wife and could explore the beauty of the supernatural when he met the little elves. The Hudson river is also a reference to legend and to the past, when it’s referred to as “majestic” and “silent”, qualities of the great leader Henry Hudson.