Bibliographie
A Companion to Alain Chartier (c. 1385-1430), Father of French Eloquence, Daisy Delogu ed., Leiden, Brill, 2015.
Chaucer and Chaucerians, Derek Brewer ed., University (Alabama), University of Alabama Press, 1966.
R.R. Agrawal, The Medieval Revival and its Influence on the Romantic Movement, New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 1990.
Christian Amalvi, Le Goût du Moyen Âge, Paris, Plon, 1996.
Candace Barrington, American Chaucers, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, London, Routledge, 1978.
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture. From Revolution through Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Chivalry, Boston, Tilton, 1858.
Kerry Dean Carso, American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014.
Kerry Dean Carso, « Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Sir Walter Scott and the Hudson River School of Painting », Gothic Studies 14-2, Nov. 2012.
Michael D’Innocenzo, « The Popularization of Politics in Irving’s NewYork », The Knickerbocker Tradition. Washington Irving’s New York, Andrew B. Meyers ed., Tarry Town/New York, Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1974.
Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays [1869], Carlisle (Massachusetts), Applewood Books, 2011.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 (1833-1836), Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher ed., Cambridge (Massachusetts), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966.
Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris, Seuil, 1985.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, traduction en anglais moderne de J.U. Nicolson, Mineola/New York, Dover Publications, 2004.
Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011.
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic. Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Washington Irving, The Crayon Miscellany, vol. 9, New York, Putman, 1861.
Washington Irving, History, Tales and Sketches, New York, The Library of America, 1983.
Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories [The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.], New York, Penguin, 1999.
Élise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine, Paris, Maspero, 1976.
Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1996.
Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, Cleveland/New York, The World Publishing Company, 1963.
Pierre-Yves Petillon, La Grand-route. Espace et écriture en Amérique, Paris, Seuil, 1979.
Richard D. Rust, « Ancient and Modern in the Writings of Washington Irving », Making America, Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, A. Robert Lee, W. M. Verhoeven éd., Amsterdam/Atlanta (Georgia), Rodopi, 1996.
Philip Young, American Fiction, American Myth, University Park (Pennsylvania), The Pennsylvania University Press, 2000.
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Notes
Irving était de ce fait réticent à publier en Angleterre : « It was not my intention to publish [the following papers] in England, being conscious that much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and, in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press », « Preface to the revised edition » (1848), Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories [The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.], New York, Penguin, 1999, p. 3.
Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, Cleveland/New York, The World Publishing Company, 1963, p. 41.
« Thus, under the kind and cordial auspices of Sir Walter Scott, I began my literary career in Europe; and I feel that I am but discharging, in a trifling degree, my debt of gratitude to the memory of that golden hearted man in acknowledging my obligations to him », « Preface to the revised edition » (1848), The Sketch Book, op. cit., p. 7.
Richard D. Rust voit dans la reprise du prénom de Chaucer le signe d’une tension entre les anciens et les modernes qui parcourt l’œuvre d’Irving : « the names of Washington Irving’s personae Jonathan Oldstyle and Geoffrey Crayon reflect apparent tensions and conflicts found between the ancient and the modern in Irving’s writings », « Ancient and Modern in the Writings of Washington Irving », Making America, Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, A. Robert Lee, W. M. Verhoeven ed., Amsterdam/Atlanta (Georgia), Rodopi, 1996, p. 183.
Envoi : « The concluding part of a literary work, esp. a short stanza concluding a ballade; (arch.) an author’s concluding words, dedication, etc. », Oxford English Dictionary.
Il s’agit en fait de la traduction par Sir Richard Roos d’un poème d’Alain Chartier (1424), attribuée à Chaucer dans l’édition de ses œuvres par Pynson en 1526. Ce n’est qu’en 1897 que la vérité est rétablie, avec la publication par Skeat du septième volume des œuvres complètes de Chaucer. D’après Ashby Kinch, « Chartier’s European Influence », A Companion to Alain Chartier (c. 1385-1430), Father of French Eloquence, Daisy Delogu ed., Leiden, Brill, 2015, p. 301.
« Go, little booke, God send thee good passage,/And specially let this be thy prayere,/ Unto them all that thee will read or hear,/ Where thou art wrong, after their help to call,/ Thee to correct in any part or all », « Chaucer’s Belle Dame sans Mercie », source citée par Irving, The Sketch Book, op. cit., p. 298.
Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris, Seuil, 1985, p. 147-149. On retrouve ici les principales fonctions de l’épigraphe énoncées par Genette.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, « Chaucer », The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 (1833-1836), ed. Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher, Cambridge (Massachusetts), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966, p. 286. Emerson prend Chaucer comme l’exemple même de l’inévitable inscription de l’écrivain dans une chaîne d’influences : « the extent of Chaucer’s obligations to his foreign contemporaries and predecessors is so great as to induce the inquiry whether he can claim the praise of an original writer. The truth is all works of literature are Janus faced and look to the future and to the past […]. There never was an original writer. Each is a link in an endless chain », Ibid., 284.
Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 71.
« there was a great deal of interest and concern in the United States during the earlier part of the nineteenth century in how the new country might relate to the longue durée of the historical past », Ibid.
D’après Lawrence Buell, la proportion atteint 85% dans les années 1820 (New England Literary Culture. From Revolution through Renaissance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, cité par Paul Giles, op. cit., p. 71).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, « Chaucer », op. cit, p. 270.
Candace Barrington, American Chaucers, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 10-11.
Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Chivalry, Boston, Tilton, 1858, p. 6.
« Americans were not borrowing the history and traditions of another culture but were rightfully reappropriating their own […]. Though America had no medieval past, many Americans felt no qualms about looking back proprietarily on the European medieval past. […] European cultural values were regarded as the rightful property of Americans, who inherited them not from the mother country but from their “forefathers” by virtue of patrilineage », Kim Moreland, The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1996, p. 5.
« James belongs to one of the most brilliant eras of our literary history, and establishes the claims of his country to a participation in its primitive honours. Whilst a small cluster of English writers are constantly cited as the fathers of our verse, the name of their great Scottish compeer is apt to be passed over in silence; but he is evidently worthy of being enrolled in that little constellation of remote but never failing luminaries, who shine in the highest firmament of literature, and who, like morning stars, sang together at the bright dawning of British poesy », Washington Irving, « A Royal Poet », The Sketch Book, op.cit, p. 75.
Emerson, « The Age of Fable », Early Lectures, op. cit., p. 253.
« The influence of Chaucer […] is very conspicuous on all our early literature. Not only Pope, Dryden, and Milton have been indebted to him but a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced », Ralph Waldo Emerson, « Chaucer », op. cit, p. 283.
« Both [Chaucer and Boccace] writ Novels, and each of them cultivated his Mother-Tongue », John Dryden, God’s Plenty, 1700, cité par Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, London, Routledge, 1978, p. 170.
Derek Brewer, Ibid., p. 18-19. Voir aussi Chaucer and Chaucerians, Derek Brewer ed., University (Alabama), University of Alabama Press, 1966, p. 259.
Pour une analyse détaillée de ces influences, voir notamment Philip Young, American Fiction, American Myth, University Park (Pennsylvania), The Pennsylvania University Press, 2000, p. 7-10.
Dans The Crayon Miscellany (1849), Irving raconte qu’en 1817 à Abbotsford, Walter Scott l’aurait emmené dans le vallon hanté de Thomas d'Erceldoune et lui aurait récité des strophes d’une ballade relatant cette légende (Washington Irving, The Crayon Miscellany, vol. 9, New York, Putman, 1861, p. 238-239).
Pour l’influence de Percy sur Bürger, voir R.R. Agrawal, The Medieval Revival and its Influence on the Romantic Movement, New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 1990, p. 174.
Philip Young, op. cit., p. 3.
Pierre-Yves Petillon. La Grand-route, Espace et écriture en Amérique, Paris, Seuil, 1979 : « La légende de Sleepy Hollow et celle de Rip Van Winkle dont l’emprise fut si grande sur l’imaginaire américain sont comme deux faces d’un même mythe opposant le sommeil (l’enracinement au creux des terres) à l’histoire considérée comme métamorphose, comme migration et tourbillon qui effacent les anciennes marques [landmarks] », p. 74.
« He recognized on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe, but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff; a sword was held in the hand instead of a scepter; the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was printed in large characters GENERAL WASHINGTON », « Rip Van Winkle », The Sketch Book, op.cit., p. 37.
Salmagundi; or The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others, est un périodique satirique fondé par Irving, où il publie une vingtaine d’essais entre janvier 1807 et janvier 1808. Ceux-ci, comme A History of New York (1809), présentent une critique de la démocratie (mobocracy, logocracy) et surtout des élections qui permet à Michael D’Innocenzo de comparer la verve satirique d’Irving à celle d’un Twain ou d’un Mencken (Michael D’Innocenzo, « The Popularization of Politics in Irving’s New York », The Knickerbocker Tradition. Washington Irving’s New York, ed. Andrew B. Meyers, Tarry Town/New York, Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1974, p. 13).
Christian Amalvi, Le Goût du Moyen Âge, Paris, Plon, 1996, p. 21.
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic. Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 79-80.
Saint Guy (aussi appelé saint Vit) est un martyr chrétien du IVe siècle, mais c’est à partir de la fin du Moyen Âge que son culte se met en place, notamment en Allemagne, avec une fête de la saint Guy marquée par des danses devant sa statue.
Dans Salmagundi (March 7, 1807), Irving décrit en des termes similaires un danseur noir rencontré à Haïti : « When he laughed, there appeared from ear to ear a chevaux-de-frise of teeth, that rivalled the shark's in whiteness. He could whistle like a northwester – play on a three-stringed fiddle like Apollo; – and as to dancing, no Long Island negro could shuffle you “double trouble,” or “hoe corn and dig potatoes,” more scientifically ». Washington Irving, History, Tales and Sketches, New York, The Library of America, 1983, p. 123.
Élise Marienstras, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine, Paris, Maspero, 1976, p. 176-183.
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. Picturesque : « artistic concept and style of the XVIIIth and early XIXth centuries characterized by a preoccupation with the pictorial values of architecture and landscape in combination with each other ».
Kerry Dean Carso, American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2014, p. 23.
Kerry Dean Carso, « Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Sir Walter Scott and the Hudson River School of Painting », Gothic Studies 14-2, Nov. 2012, p. v.
American Gothic Art, op.cit., p. 97-99. Carso donne quelques exemples majeurs de l’influence de Scott sur l’œuvre de Cole : « Cole’s paired paintings that deal with the Middle Ages, The Departure and The Return (1837) and Past and Present (1838) were no doubt inspired by his reading of Scott’s novels », Ibid., p. 100.
Ivanhoe, cité par Carso, ibid., p. 108.
« I have wandered through different countries and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to another […]. As it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel pencil in hand, and bring home their portfolios filled with sketches, I am disposed to get up a few for the entertainment of my friends […]. I fear I shall give equal disappointment with an unlucky landscape painter, who had travelled on the continent, but following the bent of his vagrant inclination, had sketched in nooks and corners and bye places. His sketch book was accordingly crowded with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins; but he had neglected to paint St. Peter's or the Coliseum; the cascade of Terni or the Bay of Naples; and had not a single Glacier or Volcano in his whole collection », « The Author’s Account of Himself », The Sketch Book, p. 9-10.
Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays [1869], Carlisle (Massachusetts), Applewood Books, 2011, p. 94.
« The richest and most perfect specimen of it that we have seen, in the northern states, is upon the cottage of Washington Irving, on the Hudson, near Tarrytown », Ibid.
« Our first essay was along a mountain brook, among the highlands of the Hudson […]. It was one of those wild streams that lavish, among our romantic solitudes, unheeded beauties, enough to fill the sketch book of a hunter of the picturesque », « The Angler », The Sketch Book, p. 264.
« […] there were some of the houses of the original settlers […]; built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weathercocks », « Rip Van Winkle », The Sketch Book, p. 29.
« The scenery on the Rhone is exceedingly fine, resembling very much that of the Hudson. Crowning the abrupt precipices, which sometimes rise into very grand forms, are numerous castles in ruins… These castle-views carry the mind back to feudal times. Through the crumbling gate-ways fancy easily calls forth the steel-clad warriors, and sounds the trumpet, or sees the dark-eyed ladies looking through the narrow windows of the mouldering towers for the return of their beloved knights from the ways », Cole, cité par Carso, American Gothic Art, op. cit., p. 100.
« It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!) […]. [Rip Van Winkle] was a descendant of the Van Winkles who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of Peter Stuyvesant », op. cit., p. 29.
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