Diedrich Knickerbocker, Regular Bred Historian

Chapter 1 analyzes the self-consciousness—and uncanny postmodernity—of Washington Irving in the various works attributed to his historian alter ego Diedrich Knickerbocker, particularly A History of New York and “Rip Van Winkle.” I argue that Irving’s Knickerbocker writings inaugurated an under-recognized tradition of antebellum writing devoted less to the creation of a coherent national past than to theorizing “history” itself. Irving’s A History of New York (1809) forms a kind of practical illustration of the dismantling of history writing in our own time. Irving’s metahistorical discourse, I claim, cannot be adequately accounted for by conventional historicist contextualization, by confining his works to a particular moment in time, much less one that has been superseded by or that is irretrievably distant and distinct from the critical present. Working in tandem with A History of New York’s disquisition on the mutability of historical knowledge is the experience of history “Rip Van Winkle” offers to its readers. A story of temporal dislocation, “Rip Van Winkle” exploits and critiques Rip’s—and the reader’s—desire to settle upon an orienting present and locate that present within a chronological sequence (before, during, and after the war).