REWRITING AND REPURPOSING MYTH: WASHINGTON IRVING’S “RIP VAN WINKLE”
REWRITING AND REPURPOSING MYTH: WASHINGTON IRVING’S “RIP VAN WINKLE”

Summary/Abstract: Rewriting myths enables authors to connect new, contemporary significations to existing mythical frameworks. Washington Irving built one of the first American myths in narrative form, Rip van Winkle, on an older German folktale, which turns out to be just one of the many iterations of the myth of the Sleeper. By constellating the myth of the birth of their national identity to a mythical system, Irving legitimizes the transition from the colonial era to the post-revolutionary one as a natural stage in history, the result of historical confluences being a new, improved consciousness, the American. Through subtle dynamic characterization, Rip, the national (anti-)hero, becomes the protype for Self-Reliance, decades before it was theorized by Emerson, as well as that of American Exceptionalism, while also subverting hegemonic interpretations of the American Dream.

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