Rip Van Winkle's Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory ed. by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg (review)

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• Rip Van Winkle's Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory ed. by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
• Leila Mansouri (bio)

Rip Van Winkle's Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory
andrew burstein and nancy isenberg, editors
Louisiana State University Press, 2022
214 pp.

Edited by historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Rip Van Winkle's Republic: Washington Irving in History and Memory marks the bicentennial of the 1819 publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. with an interdisciplinary collection of essays that engage both the historical Irving and his writing's continued multifaceted resonance with American audiences. The volume is an outgrowth of a canceled 2020 symposium that had been set to be held at Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit that promotes and seeks to educate the public on Hudson Valley historic landmarks. It includes work not only from academic historians and literary scholars but also from two members of Historic Hudson Valley's staff, the principal historian of a Westchester County public history project focused on the Revolutionary War, and Hollywood actor and screenwriter Curtis Armstrong, who has sought to adapt Irving's work. These contributors collectively stake out a conversation that bridges what usually is a sharp divide between scholarship on the early American period and the reception of early American authors in popular culture and present-day public events. In doing so, their essays offer a set of trenchant but contradictory answers to the question that animates the collection's preface: Why does Washing-ton Irving still matter?

Readers of Early American Literature likely take one of those answers for granted: Irving matters because his writings still offer scholars productive entry into key aspects of early US literature and society. Rip Van Winkle's Republic presents a number of fresh and compelling readings of The Sketch Book—including of its two most famous stories, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Two standouts among these are Michelle Sizemore's "Rites and Times of the Grand Tour" and Elizabeth L. Bradley's "Tracing Northern Slavery in the Knickerbocker Stories." In the former, Sizemore situates The Sketch Book, which Irving composed during an extended trip to Europe, in relation to the rise of the Grand Tour, which in the wake of the American Revolution became a rite of passage for white, [End Page 495] well-off young American men seeking to connect with what they saw as their cultural and civilizational forebears. Attending especially to The Sketch Book's depictions of England, Sizemore argues that through them Geoffrey Crayon, The Sketch Book's fictional narrator, invokes and distills a raced and classed Anglo-American identity that positions the United States as Britain's imperial heir and Grand Touring literary pilgrims such as himself as the new American empire's natural leaders. In doing so, she deftly denaturalizes the Americanness of Irving's literary nationalism, suggesting that it was an ethnically English American identity constituted through real and imaginative travel to Britain that produced early US imperial consciousness and enabled The Sketch Book to envisage an imperial US frontier from which Native Americans naturally vanish.

Bradley, who is currently vice president of programs and engagement at Historic Hudson Valley, focuses instead on an aspect of Irving's life in New York City and the Hudson Valley that receives relatively little attention in his prose: slavery in New York State. As Bradley notes, long after New York passed a law that gradually abolished slavery, interactions with enslaved New Yorkers remained a fact of daily life in Irving's world. Her essay not only brings to light archival records that suggest Irving routinely encountered those his neighbors and friends enslaved but also puts those records in conversation with his depictions of Black characters in The Sketch Book and elsewhere, identifying likely real-life models for many, including the itinerant musician at Baltus Van Tassel's party in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In doing so, Bradley shows how in his sketches Irving unintentionally provides a map to an enslaved community that, though constantly subject to violence and uncertainty, was nevertheless vibrant, multigenerational, and connected to African cultures. She also identifies in Irving's writing...