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"Rip Van Winkle" (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɪp fɑŋ ˈʋɪŋkəl]) is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their strong liquor and falls deeply asleep in the Catskill Mountains .
With "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is one of Irving's most anthologized, studied, and adapted sketches. Both stories are often paired together in books and other representations, and both are included in surveys of early American literature and Romanticism. [12]
The tale of a henpecked husband who sleeps away twenty years in the Catskills – a story allegedly found among the papers of Irving's fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. It is explained that Rip Van Winkle had been put under a spell after helping the spectre of Hendrick Hudson and his crew. "English Writers on America" July 31, 1819
The story was part of the inspiration for American writer Washington Irving's 1819 short story "Rip Van Winkle". [ 2 ] Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Irving composed the short story "Rip Van Winkle" overnight while staying with his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry van Wart, in Birmingham, England, a place that inspired other works as well. [32] In October 1818, Irving's brother William secured for Irving a post as chief clerk to the United States Navy and urged him to return home. [33]
The story bears varying degrees of similarity to folktales from other cultures. Rip Van Winkle is the foremost familiar example, although strictly speaking this cannot be called a "folktale", since it is a fictional work by Washington Irving loosely based on folklore. [113]
The story provides a Jewish version on the theme of a person or persons (as the Seven Sleepers) sleeping for many decades and waking to find a changed world—a theme originating in the story of Epimenides—found in many divergent cultures and traditions, and in modern times associated especially with the Rip Van Winkle story.
A time slip is a plot device in fantasy and science fiction in which a person, or group of people, seem to travel through time by unknown means. [12] [13] The idea of a time slip has been used in 19th century fantasy, an early example being Washington Irving's 1819 Rip Van Winkle, where the mechanism of time travel is an extraordinarily long sleep. [14]