"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story published by Washington Irving as a part of a larger work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Published as a series, from 1819 to 1820.) "Rip Van Winkle" is one of the earliest works of distinctively American literature. A frame narrative by "Geoffrey Crayon" introduces a tale found in the papers of the fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker: the story of Rip Van Winkle, a man who sleeps for twenty years and wakes to find that the world around him has significantly changed. One of these changes is that, during Van Winkle's long sleep, America has undergone a revolution and separated from Great Britain. This comic tale allows Irving to explore the meaning of progress and change, as well as to comment on the nature of freedom.
"Rip Van Winkle"
by Washington Irving
Washington Irving was born in 1783 in New York City, shortly before the end of the American Revolution. He grew up in an era of rapid change for New York and t...
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Considered the first professional man of letters in the United States, Washington Irving (1783-1859) was influential in the development of the short story form and helped to gain international respect...
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Considered the first professional man of letters in the United States, Washington Irving was influential in the development of the short story form and helped to gain international respect for fledgli...
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Washington Irving was America's first successful professional man of letters, a gifted teller of tales, especially as a native humorist, a romantic historian, and an influential prose stylist. As a wr...
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At the outset of Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall (1822) Geoffrey Crayon, the author's quasi-autobiographical persona, makes the following observation: "I have always had an opinion that much good...
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Washington Irving , America's first professional man of letters, devoted the latter half of his productive career primarily to historical writing. Though best remembered in the twentieth century as an...
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Washington Irving was so important a figure, so self-conscious a writer, and so given to romantic irony and satirizing authorship that the meagerness of his literary criticism and scholarship is disa...
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The first American writer to be acclaimed as a literary figure of stature on both sides of the Atlantic, Washington Irving is today regarded as an important but obscure figure of American letters. D...
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Washington Irving told an anecdote of his youth which shows both his propensity to delight in stories as well as his skepticism concerning them. A "lively boy, full of curiosity, of easy faith, and p...
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Washington Irving, America's first successful professional man of letters, was an essayist, humorist, historian, literary critic, antiquarian scholar, magazine journalist, and short-story writer. In a...
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Washington Irving, America's first professional man of letters, won his international reputation in the 1820s as a literary cosmopolitan, an interpreter especially of English and Spanish character, cu...
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"I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle & frenchhorn," Washington Irving said in an 1819 letter. While his flute music for a time wa...
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Biography EssayWashington Irving was America's first successful professional man of letters, a gifted teller of tales, especially as a native humorist, a romantic historian, and an influential prose s...
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Not only did he wake up twenty years later and found a village that knew hardly of him, but he woke up exactly 184 years later, in strange lands, where times had considerably changed. Waking up in th...
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Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" symbolizes the European sentiment towards the new society in American and establishes and identity prior and post to the American Revolution.
The charact...
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Despite the fact that my husband caused me much unnecessary grief and frustration throughout the years, I am very sad to have gone without him for such an extended period of time. None of the villag...
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In this story, there seems to be something mythical and something factual. The myth is the long night sleep of Rip and the fact is the changing events of the revolution.
In this story, the author g...
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1. It all began in the Hundson by the unforgettable Kuatskill Mountain. There was a man named Rip Van winkle. He was living in a little village that was founded by the Dutch Colonists, in the ear...
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Women have and continue struggling being classified as less than men from the beginning of creation. Historically, women were often given less power socially and politically, when things for their hus...
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In every society that I know of, there are cultural expectations. Literature tends to follow the same expectations. We have had quite a few stories in this class where we focused on cultural expecta...
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Washington Irving proved all the people in Europe and England who felt that America would never develop a literary voice of its own wrong. He was the youngest and not-too-well-educated son of a har...
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Author of Rip Van Winkle, Irvin Washington, a man honored solely for his imaginative writing uses his story to make the satirical point that social revolutions are superficial and change is a myth. L...
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When read at first glance, Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" seems to be a tale of a lazy man who just wanted some peace and quiet, and ended up with almost too much of it. When analyzed at a dee...
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"Rip Van Winkle"
Washington Irving
Washington Irving
Washington Irving
