Reviewed by:

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

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...

 审阅者：

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  瑞普·范·温克尔的《共和国：历史与记忆中的华盛顿·欧文》编辑。作者：安德鲁·伯斯坦和南希·伊森伯格
•  莱拉·曼苏里（简介）

由历史学家安德鲁·伯斯坦 (Andrew Burstein) 和南希·伊森伯格 (Nancy Isenberg) 编辑的瑞普·范·温克尔 (Rip Van Winkle) 所著的《共和国：历史与记忆中的华盛顿·欧文》标志着 1819 年杰弗里·克雷昂 (Geoffrey Crayon) 素描书出版 200 周年。一本跨学科的论文集，既吸引了历史上的欧文，也吸引了他的写作在美国观众中持续产生的多方面共鸣。该书是 2020 年研讨会的成果，该研讨会原定在历史悠久的哈德逊河谷举行，这是一个非营利组织，致力于向公众宣传和教育哈德逊河谷的历史地标。它不仅包括学术历史学家和文学学者的作品，还包括哈德逊河谷历史博物馆的两名工作人员的作品，其中包括专注于独立战争的威彻斯特县公共历史项目的首席历史学家，以及好莱坞演员兼编剧柯蒂斯·阿姆斯特朗，他一直致力于改编欧文的作品。这些撰稿人共同展开了一场对话，弥合了美国早期学术研究与流行文化和当今公共活动中美国早期作家的接受之间通常存在的巨大分歧。在这样做的过程中，他们的文章为该集序言中提出的问题提供了一系列尖锐但相互矛盾的答案：为什么华盛顿·欧文仍然很重要？

美国早期文学的读者可能会认为其中一个答案是理所当然的：欧文很重要，因为他的著作仍然为学者们提供了富有成效的切入美国早期文学和社会关键方面的机会。瑞普·凡·温克尔的《共和国》提供了许多新鲜且引人入胜的《素描本》读物，其中包括其中两个最著名的故事“瑞普·凡·温克尔”和“断头谷传奇”。其中两本杰出作品是米歇尔·塞兹摩尔的《大旅行的仪式与时代》和伊丽莎白·L·布拉德利的《在尼克博克故事中追踪北方奴隶制》。在前者中，塞兹莫尔将欧文在欧洲长途旅行期间创作的《素描书》与大旅行的兴起联系起来，大旅行在美国独立战争后成为白人的成人仪式， [结束页 495] ]富裕的美国年轻人寻求与他们所认为的文化和文明祖先建立联系。塞兹莫尔特别关注《素描书》对英国的描述，认为《素描书》的虚构叙述者杰弗里·克雷昂通过这些描述，援引并提炼了一种种族和阶级的英美身份，这种身份将美国定位为英国的帝国继承人和大英帝国的继承人。像他这样的旅行文学朝圣者是新美利坚帝国的天然领袖。 在这样做的过程中，她巧妙地使欧文文学民族主义的美国性非自然化，暗示正是通过真实而富有想象力的英国旅行而构成的英国裔美国身份，产生了早期的美国帝国意识，并使《素描书》能够设想一条美国帝国边境，美洲原住民自然消失。

布拉德利现任历史悠久的哈德逊河谷项目和参与副总裁，他的重点是欧文在纽约市和哈德逊河谷生活的一个方面，而在他的散文中相对较少受到关注：纽约州的奴隶制。正如布拉德利指出的那样，在纽约通过逐步废除奴隶制的法律很久之后，与被奴役的纽约人的互动仍然是欧文世界中日常生活的一个事实。她的文章不仅揭示了欧文经常遇到那些被奴役的邻居和朋友的档案记录，而且还将这些记录与他在《素描本》和其他地方对黑人角色的描述进行了对话，为许多人确定了可能的现实生活模型，包括《断头谷传奇》中巴尔图斯·范·塔塞尔 (Baltus Van Tassel) 派对上的巡回音乐家。在这样做的过程中，布拉德利展示了欧文如何在他的草图中无意中为一个被奴役的社区提供了一张地图，这个社区虽然经常受到暴力和不确定性的影响，但仍然充满活力，多代人，并与非洲文化有联系。她还在欧文的著作中指出......