Washington Irving

Student Name Professor Name Course Date A Comparative Analysis of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Folk stories and legends keep their audience fascinated because these narratives express the most essential symbolic motives of the people and the moment in time. At the dawn of 19th-century American literature, authors like Washington Irving drew on European legend to explore the question: Who are we as a people after the young country had separated from Britain? The 19th-century New World values and characters are explored through two of Irving’s short stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” describing the imaginative and mystical elements of the mid-19th century rivers and forests in a historical setting of New York. At first glance, both texts may be based on the legends of the Old World. Their different representation of the conflict between rationalism and superstition and the struggle between conservatism and progression offers brand new views on how the American attitude is changing now and again. Irving’s stories will cover a specific and exclusive examination that uses selected themes of superstition versus rationality and tradition versus change. By employing the European literary traditions of ballads, landscape, and the recollection of the past in his works, Irving managed to fuse the early American themes and settings. Rip Van Winkle “Rip Van Winkle” uniquely combines historical context with elements of myth, showcasing Irving’s style of embedding American identity within a European folkloric framework. Set before and after the American Revolution, the story uses Rip Van Winkle’s mystic experiences to critique the rapid changes in American society post-Revolution. As Irving(a) describes, “The strange man with a keg of liquor- the mountain ravine- the wild retreat among the rocks - the woe-begone party at ninepins - the flagon” (18). Irving notes that the story’s integration of magical elements from old European tales with the context of the American Revolution represents the new nation’s effort to understand and to explain internally the gross discontinuities wrought by social and political upheaval (Irving (a) 18). The timeless, fanciful legends of the past offer a lens for interpreting the radical shifts in early American society. Rip Van Winkle’s character further symbolizes the rupture between early America’s colonial past and the post-Revolutionary period. Irving notes, “I have observed that he was a simple good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient hen-pecked husband” (8). Rip represents the pastoral innocence and virtuousness associated with America’s pre-industrialized colonial period, which seemed to fade in the young, ambitious new nation (Irving (a) 25). As Irving analyzes, Rip’s story critiques the new values of productivity, self-determination, and progress associated with 19th-century American society, conveying a sense of loss for the previous pastoral way of life (Irving (a) 29). Hi...