The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , German  The saga of Sleepy Hollow , is a story of the American writer Washington Irving (1783-1859), who in 1820 as part of his sketchbook appeared. In addition to Rip Van Winkle from the same volume, the " legend " of the ghostly " rider without a head " is the first and one of the most famous short stories in American literature ; Ultimately, however, it goes back to a German source, a Rübezahl fairy tale collected by Johann Karl August Musäus .

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane
painting by John Quidor , 1858.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington.

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LibriVox reading of the original English version ( Ogg )

The narrator of the story, the historian Dietrich Knickerbocker, first introduces the scene of the action, the so-called "sleepy gorge". The small side valley of the Hudson River near Tarrytown , where the customs of the Dutch colonists have remained almost unchanged, is considered an enchanted place in popular belief ; it is “always under the control of some magical power, which exercises its dominion over the minds of good people and is the cause that they wander about in a constant dream. They are devoted to all kinds of belief in miracles, are subject to raptures and faces, often see all kinds of strange apparitions, and hear music and strange voices in the air. ”The most terrible of these apparitions is a“ headless horseman ” , the spirit of a Hessian Mercenary from the American War of Independence , who has a reputation for riding to the former battlefield at night to look for his severed head.

Ichabod Crane, a learned but superstitious country schoolmaster from Connecticut , ended up "about thirty years ago" in this quiet corner . In the school house he teaches the "small, tough, stubborn, broad-shouldered Dutch boys" and teaches the peasants to sing psalms. He particularly enjoys the Dutch fare and soon casts an eye on Katrina van Tassel, the daughter of a farmer with a particularly lavishly stocked pantry, on whose hand Abraham van Brunt, known as "Brom Bones", is hoping. One autumn day, Crane is invited to a feast at the van Tassels. After the meal, which is described in detail, and the subsequent dancing pleasure, people tell each other horror stories in good company; Brom Bones claims to have met the headless rider himself and to have competed with him on horseback.

When night falls, Crane makes his way home. Again and again on his ride he is frightened by eerie noises and strange shapes in the branches. Suddenly he sees at the side of the road a “rider of enormous size, riding a black horse of mighty shapes.” The figure rides beside him without speaking a word, and when the light brightened up briefly, Crane saw that the figure was “ had no head! - but his horror grew when he noticed that he was carrying his head, which should have been on his shoulders, on the button of the saddle in front of him. ”Horrified he drives his horse on, but the figure begins to pursue. Shortly before Crane reaches the church bridge to save, the ghostly rider gets up, hurls his head at the fleeing schoolmaster and throws Crane off his horse.

The next morning Ichabod Crane disappeared. A search team found only his horse and a smashed pumpkin at the bridge . At least the old women of the valley are convinced “that Ichabod was led away by the galloping Hesse.” However, according to Knickerbocker, a traveler later brought the news from New York that Crane was still alive and that his luck was elsewhere tried. Meanwhile Katharina van Tassel married Brom Bones. The latter "was always seen to make a very mischievous expression when Ichabod's story was told."

Work context

Emergence

Washington Irving, around 1820.
Engraving after a painting by Gilbert Stuart Newton

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is part of the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (German: The Sketchbook ), which Irving wrote in England in 1818/19 and whose texts first appeared in America over a period of around one and a half years in seven individual issues, first published in book form in England in 1820. The saga is the last of three “sketches” of the sixth American single issue of March 15, 1820. In the first English edition, which was also followed by the later American editions, the “saga” appeared in penultimate position, followed only by L'Envoy , a kind of greeting to the reader. The idea for the story is believed to have come to Irving, as he later wrote in a letter to Nathaniel Parker Willis , when he was walking across Westminster Bridge one Sunday in 1819 with his brother Peter Irving . However, after his nephew and biographer Pierre M. Irving , the story matured a year earlier when Irving was staying in Birmingham with his brother-in-law Henry Van Waart and indulging in stories from happy youth in the Catskills . Even then, he put a first draft on paper and later worked it out in London. In an article in Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839, Irving asserted that the story of the headless rider was actually told in the Catskills that he himself heard it from the mouth of a black man.

swell

In fact, like Rip Van Winkle , the “legend” also has a direct model in German literature. However, if Irving was confronted with allegations of plagiarism for the first story shortly after its publication, in the case of the "Sage" it was not until 1930 that Irving's source became known. Henry A. Pochmann collated Irving's story with the fifth Rübezahl legend from Johann Karl August Musäus ' collection of Folk Tales of the Germans (1782–1786) and found that Irving had taken over the central event of the story and sometimes entire sentences almost unchanged. In Musäus' fairy tale, too, the protagonist Johann sees a "pitch black figure [...] of superhuman size," on a night carriage ride through the Giant Mountains, who "did not carry her head between her shoulders as usual, but like a lap dog in her arms" and is with her a targeted throw of this very "head" down. Musäus' narrator also suggests that this incident was a prank with which the not at all supernatural "Krauskopf" got rid of his rival. Irving could be familiar with this fairy tale even with his poor knowledge of German, because a selection of Musäus' fairy tales had already been published in 1791 by John Murray in London. The story also has superficial similarities with Robert Burns ' poem Tom O'Shanter and with Gottfried August Bürger's Der wilde Jäger. The fact that Bürger's ballad could have had an impact on the composition of the “saga” seems plausible, since this poem was translated into English by Irving's friend Walter Scott around the same time and Irving himself made Bürger Lenore the basis of his story The Ghostly Bridegroom .

Genre and genre

It was also Scott who urged Irving to study the literature of German Romanticism . Irving's early works such as Salmagundi or many other European pieces of the sketchbook were trained on neoclassical style models such as Joseph Addison or Oliver Goldsmith , but the “Sage of the Sleepy Gorge” such as the “Rip Van Winkle” expresses a turn to a romantic worldview her enthusiasm for "folk" fabrics. However, like many American writers before and after him, Irving faced the problem that a young nation like the United States seemed to lack a rich past from which to capitalize on literature. His narrator clarifies this dilemma with gentle irony when he writes that his story took place “in a far removed period of American history, that is, about thirty years ago”. Only in America, according to the literary scholar Donald A. Rings, can thirty years be described as "far removed". Irving did not just move a German legend into the mountains of New York, but related it to specific events in American history, the Dutch colonial era and the War of Independence, in order to give his homeland the charm of a rich past. The Dutch colonists had already been dealt with by Irving in 1809 in his humorous History of New York (German history of the city of New York from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch dynasty ) (1809), which, like the legend, is told by the fictional historian Dietrich Knickerbocker . Compared to this satirical early work, however, the narrator's voice now seems noticeably more conciliatory - the Dutch settlers of New York were no longer the target of biting ridicule, but appear as the thoroughly endearing epitome of rural America.

Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have a special meaning not only for American literature, but also for general theory of genre , since they are considered to be the first short stories in literary history. The poetological definition of the short story , however, only came afterwards in the late 19th century, Irving himself referred to his short prose stories - as his contemporaries Poe and Hawthorne did - as tales. In contrast to the fairy tale, the individual drawing of the figures as characters comes to the fore.

Irving ultimately leaves it up to the reader to decide what actually happened in Sleepy Hollow. Although he gives numerous clear indications that it was probably Brom Bones in disguise who put Crane to flight, a reading is not completely excluded, according to which Crane was actually kidnapped by the headless rider into the realm of spirits. The ironic-humorous handling of the supernatural makes it difficult for Irving to assign the genre of actual horror literature (Gothic fiction) , even if he makes ample use of its inventory; rather, the “legend” is more clearly the story The Specter Bridegroom (Eng. The Ghost Bridegroom ) from the same volume, almost a parody of this genre. The story gains great appeal precisely through the amalgamation of two actually opposing modes, the pastoral and the "Gothic," that is, the terrible, which also belong to different literary-historical epochs: While the setting of the story is reminiscent of the pleasant "village descriptions" of Oliver Goldsmith, for example Ichabod's nocturnal ride ties in with the development of horror literature, which only began towards the end of the 18th century with Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe .

Themes and motifs

Ichabod as "Yankee"

Since Irving's stories in literary history stand at the beginning of an independent American literature, American studies in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow often looked for points of contact for developments in later American national literature . Brom Bones and Ichabod Crane were often interpreted not just as mere literary figures, but as archetypes in which idiosyncrasies and patterns of action are pre-formed that appear again and again in American literature. The rivalry between the two has been read as a dramatization of fundamental conflicts in American history and society - between West and East, country and city, pastoralism and capitalism, practical peasant cunning and abstract scholarship. Brom Bones in particular, as a hulking, yet practical man of action, was often described as the epitome of American nature, for example as the forerunner of frontier heroes such as Paul Bunyan , Mike Fink or Davy Crockett , and hero of an early tall tale (“Robber pistol "), As they shape American folklore and the work of authors, especially from the American West, such as Mark Twain .

The story takes place around 1790, at a time when great political and social upheaval was taking place in the United States. With the ratification of the new constitution, Irving's home state New York had become part of a republic in which the previously sovereign states tried to get along with one another. The “saga” is, among other things, a dramatization of a mentality conflict between New York, represented by the Dutch settlers of Sleepy Hollow, and the Yankees of New England. Ichabod Crane combines all the stereotypical characteristics of the Yankee, starting with his Old Testament name, which is tellingly taken from 1 Sam 4,21  EU : "She called the boy Ikabod - that means: The glory is gone from Israel." That is how his description falls not only unflattering or grotesque, but downright threatening:

He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snip nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

“He was tall but very skinny, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that protruded a mile from his sleeves, feet that could have been used as shovels, and his whole figure was loosely connected. Its head was small and flat on top, with huge ears, large green, glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose that looked like a weathercock that stuck on its spindle neck to announce where the wind was blowing. If, on a windy day, he was seen descending from the slope of a hill, his clothes bagging and floating around him, everyone would have him for the genius of famine that descended on the earth, or for one, in a field of corn like to take runaway scarecrow. "

Ichabod in an illustration from an 1899 edition

On the one hand, he inherited a penchant for books and scholarship from his Puritan ancestors, whereas the cohesion of the Sleepy Hollow village community is based on a culture of orality . In this context, it appears as a downright cathartic ritual that Hans van Ripper burns his books after Crane's disappearance, because since he “had never seen anything good out of so-called reading and writing, he decided not to send his children to school anymore. “It is Crane's erudition itself that becomes his undoing, because his belief in the workings of ghosts is based primarily on reading Cotton Mather's story of sorcery in New England (meaning the Wonders of the Invisible World , in which Mather, in 1693, a year after the Salem Witch Trials, reaffirmed his belief in witches and demons).

The other formative trait of Ichabod and the “typical” Yankee is his greed. Crane's immeasurable appetite determines his thinking, even his longing for Katharina van Tassel (who is described as "round as a partridge; ripe and tender and rose-cheeked like one of her father's peaches") presents itself as a desire for incorporation, so that Food is becoming a comprehensive metaphor for Ichabod's mindset. In his dreams he already sees Katharina as a devoted wife who always grants butter cakes, herself as the heir to van Tassel's possessions, on which “every roast suckling pig with a pudding in its body and an apple in its mouth” walks around. This familiar TOPUS from the fairytale land of plenty -literature differs very next paragraph of the description of Cranes greed, which identifies him as unscrupulous land speculators and restless businessman, because when he was wandering through the fields and gardens of Van Tassels his eye:

“[…] His heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea how they might be readily turned into cash and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath, and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where. ”

"[...] his heart yearned for the girl who was to inherit these properties, and his imagination expanded at the thought of how easily one could turn them into cash and use this to buy vast stretches of desert land and to make shingle palaces. Yes, his busy imagination was already realizing his hopes, and portrayed the blooming Katharina as she, with a whole family of children, sat on top of a cart loaded with all kinds of household items, while pots and kettles dangled under it; he saw himself on a quiet mare, with a colt on her heels, on the way to Kentucky, Tennessee, or God knows where. "

Tradition and change

Until Ichabod's appearance, Sleepy Hollow represented a self-contained, almost fairy-tale world, in which “people, manners, and habits remained unchanged” “during the great flow of migration and education which is so incessant in other parts of this restless land The residents of this pastoral idyll live to the rhythm of the seasons and are deeply rooted in their clods, as the land passes from father to son. Ichabod's capitalist fantasies therefore pose a threat to the foundations of social coexistence in Sleepy Hollow, but the danger is once again averted by his displacement. All in all, Irving's basic conservative attitude becomes clear here, his preference for social stasis and traditional hierarchies. The sketchbook in general and the legend of the sleepy ravine in particular have so often been read as pastoral indulgence, as a nostalgic transfiguration of a premodern, pre-capitalist “good old days”. As early as 1825, William Hazlitt described Irving's sketches as literary anachronisms. In its specifically American context, Irving's conservatism is problematic, as it is noticeably contradicting the national self-image of the USA (for example in the form of the much-invoked “ American Dream ” ), in which the possibility of spatial and social mobility (and in particular the urge for West, as also felt by Ichabod) is of great importance.

Major André's Tree , the tree on which John André was hanged in 1780, in an illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867–1939)

The fact that it was the American Revolution that shook the orderly situation makes Irving's relationship to his homeland appear all the more ambiguous. His admiration for the wealthy English nobility, which is expressed in his travel sketches, was difficult to reconcile with the republican conception of society in the United States. The legacy of the revolution is also problematic in the “saga”. Even after years, the Sleepy Hollow valley is haunted by the ghosts of the past. The ghost of the Hessian mercenary, who fell in a “nameless battle”, patrols an area that once ran the front line between the revolutionaries and the “loyalists” loyal to the king, and also where the British spy John André in 1780 ran was picked up and hanged. At Van Tassel's feast, the war veterans first indulge in memories of the battle before they talk about the headless rider:

There were several more that had been equally great in the field, not one of whom but was persuaded that he had a considerable hand in bringing the war to a happy termination.
But all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded. The neighborhood is rich in legendary treasures of the kind. Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered, long-settled retreats but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places.

"Several others also boasted that they were just as big in the field, and there was certainly no one who did not have the perfect conviction that he had made a significant contribution to bringing the war to a happy end.
All of this was nothing compared to the ghost and apparition stories which followed. The area is rich in legends of this kind. Local legends and superstitious opinions thrive best in such remote, long-inhabited corners; but they are gradually being lost in the mouths of the eternally wandering crowd that makes up the population of most of our rural towns. "

The horror in Sleepy Hollow is not only a perfectly fabulous haunt, but has its origin in actual historical events. This concrete experience also explains the depressing quality of the uncanny in the story; the literary scholar Robert Hughes interprets the emergence of the local legends in his psychoanalytically influenced reading as an expression of a collective trauma , as a sublimation of the inexpressible horrors of war and the conflicts of loyalty that arise in the war years opened deep rifts in American society and divided villages and families. Rip Van Winkle , the other short story of the sketchbook set in America, has also experienced similar interpretations , the protagonist of which fell into a twenty-year magical sleep during the colonial period, slept through the war of independence and found it difficult to find his way around the new revolutionary social order.

Fiction and reality

The narrative situation of history has attracted special attention in recent times, which raises questions about the meaning and use of fictional narration and the relationship between literature and historiography. This problem begins with the title, which identifies the story as a legend and thus assigns it to a genre that (unlike the fairy tale) moves in a field of tension between fact and fiction and extraordinary or supernatural events in connection with actual places and historical events puts. Metafictional excursions about gullibility towards sagas and legends and finally about literature itself pervade the story from its beginning to its end.

The “saga” reaches the reader of the sketchbook through a long chain of more or less reliable narrative instances , the seriousness of which is underlined several times and thus at the same time ironically undermined: the narrator of the sketchbook is the American gentleman Geoffrey Crayon traveling around England , who becomes the “saga” on the other hand, presented as a piece by the late historian Dietrich Knickerbocker, which Irving had conceived in 1809 as the narrator of his humorous "History of the City of New York", which was incorporated into his sketches. Knickerbocker, on the other hand, refers to the hearsay of the "old peasant women [...] who are the best judges in these matters" and in a "postscript" following the story to an unnamed narrator who wrote the story of Ichabod for general amusement at a meeting of Told merchants in New York. But a “long, dry-looking old gentleman” did not join in the laughter at the time, but asked him “what the practical application of the story is and what it is supposed to prove,” as a whole the story came to him “a little improbable before, "to which he replies:

"Faith, sir," replied the story-teller, "as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself."

"Well, sir," replied the narrator, "as far as that is concerned, I don't believe half of it myself."

As a framework plot, the postscript not only presents possible interpretations of the legend as examples; it also defends the literary act of creation as an end in itself against demands for didactic or moral edification. At the same time, however, the artistic freedom that Irving demands for himself as a man of letters stands in an inextricable contradiction to the claim to truthfulness that his narrator Dietrick Knickerbocker demands for historiography as a historian.

This tension is not only a metafictional accessory, but also constitutive for the plot of the story. Günter Ahrends sees two closely linked topics as central to the story: the relationship between reality and unreality and the "endangerment of the psyche by an overly sensitive imagination." The boundaries between reality and unreality are in the enchanted world of Sleepy Hollow, the village in the "fairy mountains" is flowing, for its inhabitants the work of supernatural forces seems to be a natural part, whether in the magical play of light and color of nature in the change of the day and seasons or in the form of ghostly appearances from the past of their everyday life. In Ichabod's case, the fear of the supernatural, ultimately the loss of a sense of reality, takes on pathological traits. Even if Irving humours the subject of an "unleashed imagination" that creates its own demons, he anticipates an important element of many later American horror stories (such as those of Edgar Allan Poe).

reception

After its publication, the “sketchbook” was enthusiastically received on both sides of the Atlantic and, for the work of an American author, had a previously unattained print run. Translations into several European languages, including German, were still appearing in the 1820s; Goethe, for example, was very pleased with the reading in 1823. Walter A. Reichardt assumes a direct literary influence of the "legend" for some passages by Wilhelm Hauffs Jud Suss , and an influence of the legend on the composition of Pushkin's epic poem The Iron Rider (1833) has also been claimed.

US Postal Service postage stamp , 1974

While the other “sketches”, like most of Irving's comprehensive oeuvre, were hardly read over the years and were soon forgotten, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Sage of the Sleepy Gorge” entered American folklore. They gave the American reading public the opportunity to approach their own history with a pleasantly nostalgic sentimentality and, in particular, to establish continuity with the colonial era. Shortly after Irving's death, William Cullen Bryant wrote in 1860 that the two stories are probably known to almost everyone in the United States who can read. It certainly contributed to the fact that the story was often published as a children's book and was soon canonized as school reading. Numerous towns and streets in the USA have been named after the story and its characters. The actual location of the action, the hamlet Sleepy Hollow, where Irving is also buried in the listed Sleepy Hollow Cemetery , benefits from the high level of awareness of the story and attracts numerous tourists, especially on Halloween .

The "Legend of the Sleepy Gorge" has been filmed several times. Worth mentioning are Walt Disney's 1949 animated version, which makes up the second half of the 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Taddäus Toad , the television film The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , first broadcast in 1980, with Jeff Goldblum in the lead role, and Tim Burton's feature film Sleepy Hollow (1999 ) with Johnny Depp as Ichabod and Christopher Walken as the headless rider. The plot of Burton's film adaptation differs considerably from Irving's original. From 2013 onwards, under the direction of producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci , a mystery series was created on the US broadcaster Fox under the title Sleepy Hollow , which continues the story.

Editions, translations and digital copies

Wikisource: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow  - Sources and full texts
Commons : The Legend of Sleepy Hollow  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

The authoritative edition of the sketchbook today is:

  • Washington Irving: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Edited by Haskell Springer. Twayne, Boston 1978. [= Volume 8 of: Henry A. Pochmann, Herbert L. Kleinfield, Richard D. Rust (Eds.): The Complete Works of Washington Irving. 30 volumes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison / Twayne, Boston 1969–1986.]

E-text:

Younger translation:

  • Washington Irving: Sleepy Hollow and Other Mysterious Stories. Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-7466-1647-6 .

Secondary literature

  • Jochen Achilles: Washington Irving: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' - A precarious American dream of the good life. In: Klaus Lubbers (ed.): The English and American short story. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1990, pp. 1-11.
  • David Anthony: "Gone Distracted": "Sleepy Hollow", Gothic Masculinity and the Panic of 1819. In: Early American Literature 40, 2005, pp. 111-144.
  • John Clendenning: Irving and the Gothic Tradition. In: Bucknell Review 12: 2, 1964, pp. 90-98.
  • Sarah Clere: Faulkner's Appropriation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in The Hamlet . In: Mississippi Quarterly 62: 3/4, 2009, pp. 443-456.
  • Albert J. von Frank: The Man That Corrupted Sleepy Hollow. In: Studies in American Fiction 15: 2, 1987, pp. 129-141.
  • Lloyd M. Daigrepont: Ichabod Crane: Inglorious Man of Letters. In: Early American Literature 19: 1, 1984, pp. 68-81.
  • Terence Martin: Rip, Ichabod, and the American Imagination . In: American Literature 31: 2, May 1969.
  • Daniel Hoffman: Prefigurations: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In: PMLA 68: 3, 1953, pp. 425-435.
  • Robert Hughes: Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History . In: Arizona Quarterly 61: 3, 2005, pp. 1-26.
  • Laura Plummer, Michael Nelson: "Girls Can Take Care of Themselves": Gender and Storytelling in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In: Studies in Short Fiction 30, 1993, pp. 175-184.
  • Donald A. Rings: New York and New England: Irving's Criticism of American Society . In: American Literature 38: 4, 1967, pp. 161-168.
  • Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky: The Value of Storytelling: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in the Context of “The Sketch Book” . In: Modern Philology 82: 4, 1985, pp. 393-406.
  • Greg Smith: Supernatural Ambiguity and Possibility in Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'. In: The Midwest Quarterly 42: 2, 2001, pp. 174-182.
  • Terry W. Thompson: "Lively but complicated": English Hegemony in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . In: Midwest Quarterly 54: 2, 2013, pp. 136-148.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Washington Irving: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Edited by Haskell Springer. Twayne, Boston 1978. [= Volume 8 of: Henry A. Pochmann , Herbert L. Kleinfield, Richard D. Rust (Eds.): The Complete Works of Washington Irving. 30 volumes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison / Twayne, Boston 1969–1986.]. Pp. 340-379.
  2. ^ Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving , Oxford University Press, New York 1935, Vol. 1, p. 429, fn 90.
  3. ↑ Pierre M. Irving: Life and Letters of Washington Irving. GP Putnam, New York 1862. Volume I, pp. 335-336.
  4. ↑ Washington Irving: Sleepy Hollow: An Essay. In: Knickerbocker Magazine , May 1839.
  5. ^ Henry A. Pochmann : Irving's German Sources in "The Sketch Book." In: Studies in Philology 27: 3, July 1930. pp. 477-507.
  6. ↑ quoted from: JKA Musäus: Volksmärchen der Deutschen. Winkler, Munich 1976. pp. 250-277. Digitized at zeno.org
  7. ↑ EL Brooks: A Note on Irving's Sources. In: American Literature 25: 2, 1953. pp. 229-230.
  8. ^ Henry A. Pochmann: Irving's German Sources in "The Sketch Book." In: Studies in Philology 27: 3, 1980. pp. 477-507.
  9. ^ Walter A. Reichart: Washington Irving and Germany. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1957, pp. 33 ff.
  10. ^ Terence Martin: Rip, Ichabod, and the American Imagination. S. 143. (in a remote period of American history — that is to say, some thirty years since.)
  11. ↑ Hoffmann 1953, pp. 427-428.
  12. ↑ See, for example, Fred L. Pattee: Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey . Harper & Brother, New York 1923.
  13. ↑ Werner Hoffmeister, The German Novelle and the American "Tale": Approaches to a genre-typological comparison , in: The German Quarterly 63: 1, 1990, pp. 44–45.
  14. ↑ See in particular: Smith: Supernatural ambiguity and possibility in Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'.
  15. ↑ Henry A. Pochmann coined the term "sportive Gothic" for Irving's mode. In: Irving's German Sources in "The Sketch Book." , P. 506.
  16. ^ A b Donald A. Rings: New York and New England: Irving's Criticism of American Society . In: American Literature 38: 4, 1967.
  17. ↑ See z. B. Daniel Hoffman: Prefigurations: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 1953.
  18. ^ David Greven: Troubling Our Heads about Ichabod: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood. In: American Quarterly 56: 1, 2004.
  19. ↑ See z. B. Helmbrecht Breinig: The culinary imaginary: Orality, identity and culture in some texts of American literature. In: Christa Grewe-Volpp, Werner Reinhardt: Exquisite food: literary and cultural studies contributions to hunger, satiety and enjoyment. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 2003. S. 19ff. and Frederick Kaufman: Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving. In: Gastronomica 3: 2, 2003. pp. 41-49. and Terence Martin: Rip, Ichabod, and the American Imagination , pp. 143-144.
  20. ^ Martin Roth: Comedy and America. The Lost World of Washington Irving. Kennikat Press, Port Washington NY 1976, p. 165.
  21. ↑ See in particular the article by David Anthony (2005).
  22. ^ William Hazlitt: The Spirit of the Age. Henry Colburn, London 1825, p. 421.
  23. ↑ Jochen Achilles: Washington Irving: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' - A precarious American dream of the good life. P. 8 ff.
  24. ↑ Allen Guttman: Washington Irving and the Conservative Imagination. In: American Literature 36: 2, 1964, pp. 165-173.
  25. ^ Robert Hughes, 2005.
  26. ↑ See e.g. B. Colin D. Pearce: Changing Regimes: The Case of Rip Van Winkle. In: Clio 22, 1993.
  27. ↑ See in particular the essay by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, 1985.
  28. ↑ Jochen Achilles: Washington Irving: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' - A precarious American dream of the good life. Pp. 4-5.
  29. ^ Dana Del George: The Supernatural in Short Fiction of the Americas. Greenwood Press, Westport and London 2001. p. 55.
  30. ^ Michael T. Gilmore: The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Period . In: Sacvan Bercovitch (Ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature , Volume 1: 1590-1820 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997, pp. 669-671.
  31. ^ Robert A. Bone: Irving's Headless Hessian: Prosperity and the Inner Life. In: American Quarterly 15: 2, pp. 167-175.
  32. ^ Günter Ahrends: The American short story . 5th, improved and enlarged edition. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier 2008, pp. 51–52.
  33. ^ Walter A. Reichart: Washington Irving's Influence in German Literature . In: The Modern Language Review 52: 4, 1957.
  34. ↑ Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy: Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman and Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow": A Curious Case of Cultural Cross-Fertilization? In: Slavic Review 58: 2, 1999. pp. 337-351.
  35. ^ Tim Killick: British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century. Ashgate, Aldershot 2008. pp. 53-54.
  36. ^ William Cullen Bryant: Discourse on the Life, Character and Genius of Washington Irving. In: George P. Putnam (Ed.): Washington Irving . GP Putnams, New York 1860, p. 22.
  37. ↑ Nicole Neroulias: Sleepy Hollow Capitalizing on Legend . In: New York Times , October 24, 2008.
  38. ↑ See, for example, the review by Jonathan Rosenbaum: Hollow Rendition ( Memento from July 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Chicago Reader , November 19, 1999.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 1, 2009 in this version .