Early American Literature

Taking a transatlantic and now global perspective on Washington Irving, recent scholarship has brought into focus a cosmopolitan and at times transgressive author. Irving's sojourns abroad and his term as diplomat to Spain gave him a transnational perspective on a turbulent nation [End Page 535] and world. He was aware, as Richard McLamore notes, of "the challenges posed and possibilities opened by the US postcolonial status" ("The Dutchman in the Attic: Claiming an Inheritance in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon," American Literature, vol. 72, no. 1, 2000, p. 51). Irving has often been judged as an artist compelled by market forces to temper his satiric voice, masking historical realities in favor of sentiment and romance. However, he raised critical questions about American nationalism and nascent imperialism. By establishing how persistently Irving questioned American (particularly Anglo-American) hegemony, expansion, and economic development, J. Woodrow McCree's book is a welcome contribution to these lines of critical reassessment and debate.

To this study, McCree brings an interdisciplinary framework: he draws on social history, his own background in philosophy and religion, and his interest in how painting and literature intersect. Investigating the fusion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ethics and arts in Irving's work, he argues that the principles of world citizenship and the picturesque aesthetic intertwine to promote cultural and ecological diversity; those values inform Irving's critique of nineteenth-century American culture. The six chapters are organized thematically to uncover a "widely-ranging consistency [of Irving's values and beliefs] across many works" over time (64). The early chapters establish why world citizenship and the picturesque aesthetic mattered to Irving; subsequent chapters track how these values play out in his critique. The organizational strategy results in a recursive treatment of ideas across chapters. It also positions Irving's varied works in close conversation with each other, as McCree draws extensively from early journals and letters, fiction, travel writing, and selected histories. McCree's study is also distinguished by the continual interplay of literary works with neoclassical and contemporary paintings. McCree incorporates Asher Durand's 1850 painting Early Morning at Cold Spring, for example, to discuss the distinctive ways Irving, Durand, and Thomas Cole responded to the ongoing destruction of America's great old trees.

In chapter 1, McCree addresses the disparaging views of those twentieth-century critics and biographers who found Irving insufficiently "American" and only superficially "Romantic," notably Stanley Williams in The Life of Washington Irving (Oxford UP, 1935). In some respects, McCree's study complements the work of scholars who question the artificiality of period classifications, particularly critics' tendency to group Irving solely [End Page 536] with the previous generation of neoclassicists: Paul Giles, for example, finds this association "misleading" (The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castronova [Oxford UP, 2012], 16). McCree does not situate Irving in one period but describes him traversing period as well as national and aesthetic boundaries. Rather than downplay Irving's affinity for neoclassicism, however, McCree argues for its pertinence to Irving's critical stance on American intolerance. His knowledge of the Cynics and Stoics fostered Irving's healthy skepticism and his rejection of cultural chauvinism. From Oliver Goldsmith, Irving adopted the ideal of a cosmopolitan "Citizen of the World" who values "the world's rich diversity of people, customs, costumes, and terrain" (20).

Irving's commitment to these values, along with his wariness of religious orthodoxy, superstition, and intolerance, is made apparent in his earliest writing. McCree's second chapter deals primarily with Irving's first major work, A History of New York (1809), offering his most trenchant satire of European religious and cultural intolerance. "World Citizenship" might encompass Irving's writing about Islam or Spanish Hispaniola, but those works typically fall outside the scope of McCree's focus, Irving's writings about the United States. For example, he closely analyzes Irving's portrait of a colonial African American slave community...