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Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian

Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian JeFFReY InsKo Oakland University Washington Irving has been a casualty of chronology. More precisely, he has been a casualty of a particular way of thinking about history: the notion that history progresses through chronological, linear time.1 For if one of the stories of the literature of the United States is the story of dawning modernity, the best that can be said about Irving is that he represents an incipient phase in the process; his writings and his career are merely harbingers of better things to come, notably, the more mature works of Cooper and then (especially) Hawthorne and Melville. This, at any rate, long constituted the standard view, which described Irving's work not as "timeless, but temporal" and cast Irving himself as "a man of his time rather than for all time," belonging "to an outdated phase of culture," "too remote to engage twentieth-century sensibilities."2 In this view, Irving would seem to be a victim of the very historical processes his historian alter-ego Diedrich Knickerbocker attempts to forestall in Irving's first major work, A History of New York (1809). There, Knickerbocker takes on the task of rescuing the history of the Dutch settlement of New York from the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Early American Literature University of North Carolina Press

Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian

Insko, Jeffrey.
Early American Literature , Volume 43 (3) – Nov 26, 2008
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 The University of North Carolina Press
ISSN
1534-147X
Publisher site
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Abstract

JeFFReY InsKo Oakland University Washington Irving has been a casualty of chronology. More precisely, he has been a casualty of a particular way of thinking about history: the notion that history progresses through chronological, linear time.1 For if one of the stories of the literature of the United States is the story of dawning modernity, the best that can be said about Irving is that he represents an incipient phase in the process; his writings and his career are merely harbingers of better things to come, notably, the more mature works of Cooper and then (especially) Hawthorne and Melville. This, at any rate, long constituted the standard view, which described Irving's work not as "timeless, but temporal" and cast Irving himself as "a man of his time rather than for all time," belonging "to an outdated phase of culture," "too remote to engage twentieth-century sensibilities."2 In this view, Irving would seem to be a victim of the very historical processes his historian alter-ego Diedrich Knickerbocker attempts to forestall in Irving's first major work, A History of New York (1809). There, Knickerbocker takes on the task of rescuing the history of the Dutch settlement of New York from the

Journal

Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Nov 26, 2008

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