Irving, Washington - Marjorie Pryse (essay date 1997)
Marjorie Pryse (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: “Origins of American Literary Regionalism: Gender in Irving, Stowe, and Longstreet” in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, University of Iowa Press, 1997, pp. 17-37.
[In the following essay, Pryse explores the advent of regionalism by comparing Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Lot” to Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”]
Any attempt to construct a narrative of the origins of regionalism must begin by acknowledging the problematic status of such an attempt in a critical climate where both “origins” and “regionalism” are themselves contested terms. In a survey of this problem, Amy Kaplan builds her discussion of late-nineteenth-century regionalism on the post-Civil War cultural project of national reunification. For Kaplan, this project involved forgetting a past that included...
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