Product Description

With these words, Washington Irving expresses the dilemma of every American artist in the nineteenth century. The Sketch-Book (1820-1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. He sketches a series of encounters with the cultural shrines of the parent nation, and in two brilliant experiments with tales transplanted from Europe creates the first classic American short stories, 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow'. The result was not only a hugely successful travel book; it exerted a strong formative influence on American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to Henry James, and is well worth rediscovery in its own right today. Based on Irving's final revision of his most popular work, this new edition includes comprehensive explanatory notes of The Sketch-Book's sources for the modern reader. In her introduction, Susan Manning suggests that the author forged a new idiom, the 'Literary Picturesque', to accommodate and turn to advantage his dilemma of dual literary allegiances.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #657605 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

About the Author
Susan Manning is a University Lecturer in English at Cambridge, and a Fellow of Newnham college. She has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and Scottish writing, including the critical study, The Puritan-Provincial Vision (1990). She has edited Walter Scott's Quentin Durward in World's Classics

Customer Reviews

The beginnings of 'real' homegrown American literature
I don't think many people will want to read this book for fun, although, as something to dip into - perhaps in the spirit of its original publication, as a periodical in monthly chunks - it could be just about amusing. Some readers may be interested in Irving as a forerunner of other American writers, or perhaps in what this book has to say about the relationship between English and American literature in the early nineteenth century.

If so, you will find that this edition (Oxford World Classics) is admirably edited, with detailed and interesting notes and an illuminating introduction by Susan Manning. I would definitely recommend it to anyone studying the book as part of a literature course.

The Sketch Book is an account of an apparently light tourist exploration of some aspects of Europe and America as Irving saw them. Not a travelogue in any generally accepted sense, it is, as its name suggests, more like a series of sketches.

Like many Americans before and since, Irving had an ambivalent relationship with Europe and this is what makes his stories of it interesting. However, his descriptions of English customs, places and people will probably seem quaint (at best) to most readers today. In my opinion he is more interesting when he is creating some myths about his own country. This is probably why he is best known for two memorable, and very American, tales - Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, both of which appeared first in The Sketch Book so you can read them here. These are both truly valuable pieces of writing and well worth study.

If you want a rather more fun and up to date take on the subject of an American in England, why not compare this book with Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island? A bit of a jump, I know, but give it a go, it made me think.