Dorson finds at least eleven examples of stock Yankee characters in American plays before Irvings Sketch Book. note 1 The Yankee first appears in the annals of formai litereture as a comic character in Royall Tyler's play, The Contrast (1787). The conflict between them was soon to become a major theme in our literature, as well as a continuing motif in a century and a half of folktales, and in our national history. the backwoodsman- who had already emerged as the dominant types in our regional folk traditions. The case for Irving's achievement in this direction rests primarily upon the personalities of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” There he gave our literature its first important statement of the clash of regional characters-the Yankee vs. But I wish to praise him on other grounds: as the first important American author to put to literary use the comic mythology and popular traditions of American character which, by the early nineteenth century, bad proliferated widely in oral tradition. He is valued, too, as a pioneer, introducing Continental romanticism and the Gothic mode into American writing. Irving has been acclaimed as our literary mediator with England, where he was the first American to win critical praise. In this essay I hope to restore to Washington Irving a small measure of his fame as the first significant author of American fiction.
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