CRAYONESQUE AESTHETICS IN PROSE AND ARCHITECTURE--A CHAPTER IN THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE (WASHINGTON IRVING, SKETCH BOOK, ASSOCIATIONISM, PICTURESQUE)

This study examines Irving's participation in and influence on early American culture. The first half focuses on the general problems of nineteenth century aesthetics and on Irving's search for a literary strategy that allows for the interplay of taste and subjectivity. The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle (1802) and Salmagundi (1807-1808) demonstrate his preoccupation with the aesthetic inconsistencies of neoclassical literary theory. Associationist psychology and personal crises combined to refocus Irving's art. As Joy Kasson's recent study Artistic Voyagers (1985) has pointed out, The Sketch Book (1819-1820) radically differs from Irving's earlier works in turning to explore the creative process itself. Associationism provides the model by which Irving responds to the Old World and through which he finds the key to his own artistic identity (Kasson). Irving intentionally places sketches in groupings which repeat a similar lyrical pattern of movement among melancholy, transcendence and comic parody. By charting the emotional intensities and the overall curve from opening to closure, we can better appreciate the nature of The Sketch Book as a Romantic's journey into the self.;The aesthetic issues and imaginative strategies that provide the stimuli for Irving's prose also operate in the creation of Sunnyside (1835-1859). Although the English artist George Harvey helped Irving design Sunnyside, the house grows out of Irving's own literary and aesthetic preoccupations. Drawing many of his architectural ideas from Humphrey Repton and James Claudius Loudon, Irving carefully laid the foundations for an associationist reading of the architecture in Dutch-American and European history. Because of his prominence as an author, his house had an unprecedented influence on the introduction of picturesque architecture in America. Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing used Irving to endorse their architectural practice. Journalists and artists popularized Sunnyside to an even wider audience. As a symbol of the new gentility, Irving's Sunnyside was exploited for its sentimental images of middle-class values. This in turn has contributed to the critical literature's failure to appreciate that Irving's Sunnyside, like The Sketch Book, is an important statement of the associationist aesthetic in American art.