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Washington Irving and Islam contributes to understanding the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world, valuable not only for studies of Washington Irving, American Literature, or Islam, but also for thinking through the role Islam and the “Orient” have played in American literature and history, a critical field receiving ever-increasing attention. The global context of Irving’s work ties these essays together as does an understanding that his writings challenge easy classification of the Muslim other, and, indeed, challenge easy classification of Irving’s own responses to that other. Washington Irving bestrides opposing positions as well as distant worlds.

Deep within New York's compelling, sprawling history lives an odd, ornery Manhattan native named Diedrich Knickerbocker. The name may be familiar today: his story gave rise to generations of popular tributes-from a beer brand to a basketball team and more-but Knickerbocker himself has been forgotten. In fact, he was New York's first truly homegrown chronicler, and as a descendant of the Dutch settlers, he singlehandedly tried to reclaim the city for the Dutch. Almost singlehandedly, that is. Diedrich Knickerbocker was created in 1809 by a young Washington Irving, who used the character to narrate his classic satire,A History of New York. According to Irving's partisan narrator, everything good and distinctive, proud and powerful, about New York City-from the doughnuts to the twisting streets of lower Manhattan-could be traced back to New Amsterdam. Terrific general interest, cultural history of a city with a rich and lively literary past. First-ever book on the eponymous myth that has informed New York City culture since the early 1800s. Coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of Washington Irving's publication ofA History of New York. Perfect gift book or addition to library collection of New York Cityùthemed books. Includes a gallery of images that brings Diedrich Knickerbocker, his myth, time, and place to life Knickerbocker engagingly traces the creation, evolution, and prevalence of Irving's imaginary historian in New York literature and history, art and advertising, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Who would imagine this satiric character, at once a snob and a champion of the people, would endure for two hundred years? In Elizabeth L. Bradley's words, \"Whether you call it 'blood,' style, attitude, or moxie, the little Dutchman could deliver.\" And, from this engaging work, it is clear that he does. Bradley's stunning volume offers a surprising and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of New York history, and invites readers into the world of Knickerbocker, the antihero who surprised everyone by becoming the standard-bearer for the city's exceptional sense of self, or what we now call a New York \"attitude.\"

Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” still haunts us today 200 years after it was written. Irving incorporated Gothic elements such as ancient and isolated settings, nature, superstitions, and supernatural ambiguity into his short story.  Irving also included historical figures such as the British Major John André  and the headless Hessian soldier.  The author wove elements of the Gothic with historical facts from the American Revolution to create a memorable, uniquely American story.  

This volume makes available, for the first time in collected form, a series of sketches by Washington Irving which were published anonymously in a political newspaper, The Corrector, in 1804. The Corrector, a short-lived political sheet, was published in New York City by Washington Irving’s brother Peter Irving. While it has been assumed that Washington Irving contributed to the periodical, the present collection represents the first attempt to identify his contributions. The collection contains forty-five pieces by Washington Irving. In addition, Professor Roth provides a literary and historical background in a lengthy introduction, as well as annotations for each selection, giving the documentary evidence on which the attribution of authorship is based. Washington Irving’s sketches for The Corrector were written as campaign literature for Aaron Burr in the New York gubernatorial election of 1804. As Professor Roth points out, they are filled with low and indecent abuse, and they contradict accepted notions of Irving’s literary character. The view of Irving from the nineteenth century onward has been that of a gentle, genial, and dignified personality, and his excursions in low invective or slapstick have generally been dismissed as accidents or exceptions to his read nature. The editor places this body of Irving’s work in the perspective of traditional invective and traces its relationship to other comic and satiric writing of the eighteenth century.

When challenged emerge as the living image of a pieta, shrugging your shoulders, declining your head, casting up your eyes, saying nothing. All the same, you can barely manage your own farm. 3 The original face of Rip lacks the aspect of seriousness at play, the melancholy party of pleasure observed in the ghosts of the crew of the Half Moon, whose sounds of ninepin bowling ring out from the mountain like distant peals of thunder. Wolf yipped alongside as the curved hook of the moon sheared against his scruff, taming the wild dormant night inside him. Hendrick Hudson kept a vigil every twenty years with his crew of the Half Moon. For Rip it was a thunder that said: god I am going to shake the base of the house, I am going to shake it from its foundation where it sits cockeyed and misaligned, I am going to shake it so it is no longer like two roads gone crooked, so it is no longer a house filled with your laughter. 7 Does God's dreamless sleep never waver above the world, is the eye that never closes in sleep never moved by the world's tumult, wars and suffering, unholy exercises of free will, retributions and foundering patience, dynamic art?

This essay examines Washington Irving's domestic writings of the 1820s, and it argues that Irving devised the sketch as the literary genre of bachelorhood. In lavish, detailed sketches of numerous homes, Irving created a literary counterpart of the still life, but the effect of these sketches depended on the excision of women's domestic labor and the portrayal of the home in a state of static readiness, with all housework already completed. Irving's tales, however, often depict women's hidden domestic activities and show the invisible labors that underlie his sketches. These tales, however, portray women's housework as a source of terror, and they provide an implicit explanation for his sketches' omissions. The home in Irving's writings is an appealing aesthetic spectacle, but it poses grave danger to the unwitting bachelor, and Irving suggests that it is better to remain detached and unsettled than to risk the perils of heterosexual intimacy.

Washington Irving has long attracted the interest of folklorists for his literary use of folkloric material, which he crafted into enduring North American legends such as the story of Rip Van Winkle. In this article, I argue that he was a participant in one of the earliest self-conscious revivals of folk traditions in the English-speaking world, motivated by social and religious concerns.

Washington Irving claims he stayed up late at night wondering if scientists on the moon would discover and civilize the globe. Irving's imagination exemplifies exorbitance because it delivers an extraplanetary ambit that distances cultural habits in ways that reveal outlandish angles of fresh perspective. Here, Marr discusses that by celebrating how the diversions and digressions of literary art help to empower expatiation and expatriation as mutually correspondent processes for deterritorializing imagination.

James Kirke Paulding and William and Washington Irving’s literary periodical Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others (1807) has been incorporated into accounts of Washington Irving’s protoromanticism that define American romanticism through an oppositional relationship between the aesthetic retreat of the artist and the consensus-driven consumerism of a feminized reading public. This essay argues that through the self-conscious assumption of bachelor pseudonyms, the Salmagundi editors’ aggressively masculine domestic retreat can be read as a reaction to the insufficiently reductive categories of a literary culture increasingly organized by gender difference. Even as the Salmagundi bachelor-editors mock the performative virtue of feminine domesticity, their own humorous social critique works to reestablish the possibility of making reform feel in tune with natural impulses. The bachelors locate the source of their imaginative whimsy within the domestic sphere’s supposed transcendence of social artifice and market pressures, but they also claim authorship by distinguishing their imaginative output from the termagant’s domestic labor. Because the editors’ reformative project depends on readers recognizing the alienated bachelor as a humorous literary type, the hostile relationship to its readers that has earned Salmagundi a place in narratives of Irving’s protoromanticism actually signals a collaborative relationship with readers who are repeatedly forced to acknowledge the editors’ authorial design.