Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving

Every school child has read Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the story of an itinerant schoolteacher, poetaster, and rejected suitor named Ichabod Crane who witnesses the apparition of a headless horseman, that terrifying spectre whose detached cranium is in fact nothing but a pumpkin. Over the years this country's most famous ghost story has been interpreted in many waysas political allegory, archetypal comedy, forerunner of the American gothic traditionbut never specifically as a piece about food. Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving will examine the role of squash and other edibles in Irving's work and seek to define a relationship between the early American food story and the early American ghost story, the link between what Irving once called America's "eating mania" and gut terror.