I think the character of Duncan still totally forgot to pay heed to blue’s request, but otherwise it’s on the up and up. You could even ignore that all the humans are drawn with pink or peach or white crayons, if you had half a mind to. Rip Van Winkle” have been called the first American short stories, although both are actually Americanized versions of German folktales. In addition to the stories based on folklore, the collection contains travel sketches, literary essays, and miscellany. The Sketch Book was a celebrated event in American literary history. The collection was the first American work to gain international literary success and popularity.
It was followed by Dubliners, a collection of short stories, in 1914, and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. June 16, 1904, is the day that James Joyce, the Irish author of Modernist masterpieces like Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and who was described as “a curious mixture of sinister genius and uncertain talent,” set his seminal work, Ulysses. It also thought to be the day that he had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. To this day, fans around the world know June 16 as “Bloomsday,” after one of the book’s protagonists. Due to his failing eyesight, Joyce wrote much of his last novel in crayon on pieces of cardboard.
Both also incorporate elements of science fiction and belong to the genre of time-travel narratives.6 Both use the time-travel device as a means of commenting ironically on the revolutionary upheavals that had marked the birth of a new social order, and on the persistence of old practices despite those upheavals. Yet the ideological premises of the two stories and the uses to which they put the myths, archetypes, and generic conventions they borrow could hardly be more antipodal. The value of the story, however, is even greater than the fact of its existence or the reconciliation a neon lamp produces what kind of visible spectrum? it allows Rip. All the changes that Rip perceived were the work of history, whose ability to bring these about is, as John Lynen has said, “summed up in the great political event revolution.”17 Yet the reader may legitimately wonder on which level of reality the alterations occurred; in what stream of human time-consciousness do the changes register? Prerevolutionary politics was confined to the perusal of an antiquated newspaper and the leisurely discussions this activity engendered, while postrevolutionary politics involves the thunder of an election-day debate.
But while the story contains a Federalist subtext, Irving, in the end, criticizes both parties for politicizing America. The class vocabulary of “mob” and “riot,” especially since the “mob” is the disenfranchised “army” of women and children, identifies the man as a conservative Federalist. The same vocabulary was used similarly in Irving’s anti-electoral letter to Mary Fairlie (2 May 1807; see bottom p. 91, top p. 92).
So to produce a book where pink and flesh are equated with skin tones and that possibility isn’t even considered with beige or brown makes for a complicated reading. It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re not thinking about it at first, but you would have thought that someone in the course of editing this thing might have brought the point up with Mr. Daywalt. Heck, they might have brought it up with Jeffers too, since he’s the one who came up with the naked monster picture in the first place. Bloom returns home with Stephen, makes him a cup of cocoa, discusses cultural and linguistic differences between them, considers the possibility of publishing Stephen’s parable stories, and offers him a place to stay for the night. Stephen refuses Bloom’s offer and is ambiguous in response to Bloom’s proposal of future meetings.
As one of those pilgrims paying homage, Crayon demonstrates his long-established love for Shakespeare and the extent of his familiarity with his work. English poetry lives in an American’s memory and thrives better there, it seems from the evidence of these sketches, than in the minds of the Bard’s compatriots, who show less curiosity than their visitor and are content to relay a smattering of stale and suspect information. Seeking to gratify a home audience as well as a British one, Crayon carefully excepted one feature of travel from those which would be improved abroad. In point of landscape, he considered the United States superior by virtue of its rugged wilderness. “No,” he reassures us, “never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery” (8-9).
In the wake of the controversy, still other commentators charged that Gabler’s changes were motivated by a desire to secure a fresh copyright and another seventy-five years of royalties beyond a looming expiration date. Hans Walter Gabler’s 1984 edition was the most sustained attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd’s main theoretical criticism is of Gabler’s choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text , but this fault stems from an assumption of the Anglo-American tradition of scholarly editing rather than the blend of French and German editorial theories that actually lay behind Gabler’s reasoning. The choice of a composite copy-text is seen to be problematic in the eyes of some American editors, who generally favour the first edition of any particular work as copy-text.
The Dutch, moreover, tell these tales artistically, neither as first-hand accounts nor as “extracts” from books, as Ichabod does, but as still living legends. The sole exception is Brom Bones’ account of his match with the Headless Horseman, a tale combining a youthful irreverence for the mythology of his elders with a point that not even the supernatural is to be dreaded. Generically, the Dutch tales are poles apart from Ichabod’s monstrous and unfriendly indication to his female hosts of the “fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!” (p. 277).
Othmar and Musaeus were collectors and redactors of folktales and märchen. Irving knew personally a third folklorist, Dr. Karl Böttiger, ‘who undoubtedly was able to give him expert advice on his folklore studies.’4 Wherever Irving went he collected popular sayings and beliefs; he was prepossessed by a sense of the past, and recognized the power—and the usefulness to a creative artist—of popular antiquities. Brom and Ichabod had their beginnings in local characters he had known as a boy;5 what made them take their singular form, however, was the direction in which Irving’s imagination impelled them. This year is also seeing the publication of The Black Rabbit by Philippa Leathers. In that particular book a little white rabbit keeps seeing a “scary” big black rabbit that he runs away from.