Washington Irving’s works The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle are considered some of the most important pieces of New York
Folk Studies and American literature. Their rich and contemplative narratives, as well as settings, have seen a huge readership across generations.
The main intention of this article is to focus on how the contemporary digital era has led to the reimagination and readaptation of Washington
Irving’s works through various digital and virtual means. With the advent of digital materials, such as e-books, Kindle, and audiobooks, we have
gained easy access to the works. Numerous interesting and engaging storytelling platforms have offered immersive experiences and helped to
engage new audiences interestingly and excitingly. Two platforms, among them, are virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. They
have broadened our minds to such an extent as to make us capable of critically analyzing the texts through various dimensions.
Folklore in Literature
Toppling the Tables:
South Asian regional cinema has consistently served as a medium for exploring the multifaceted nature of identity and complex social structure. Currently, amid the newly emerging film genres, a subgenre of horror, featuring supernatural entities, illuminates the role of religious belief and narratives in shaping South Asian worldviews. The emergence of such films topples the East/West dichotomies, by bringing to the forefront the dynamics between the regional/vernacular and the dominant/mainstream within the Indian context. Therefore, this study proposes an appendage of intersectionality to subalternity, arriving at the framework of intersectional subalternity, manifesting at the level of ideas and ideologies to study the movement from the periphery to the center in the South Asian cinematic genre.
Fairy Tales for the Queer Desi:
Fairy tales have been retold, rewritten, and reproduced across media for centuries. Although traditionally, fairy tales have championed reproductive future by celebrating the heteronormative “happily ever-after,” indicated by the union between heterosexual couples, Queer rewritings of fairy tales and scholarship on this matter are not completely scarce in the West. There is, however, a dearth of Queer fairy tales for the Desi audience, and naturally, therefore, limited scholarship available on the matter….The absence of Queer fairy tales in traditional Indian folklore keeps Queerness invisible in the cognitive landscape of children while perpetuating heteronormativity.
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Commentary:
In a 1935 letter to his fellow pulp fiction author and one-time collaborator E. Hoffman Price, Howard Phillips Lovecraft explained that he “always preferred to use established folklore legends as little as possible” and strove to “invent his own fantastic violations of natural law” (Lovecraft 1976). This statement might surprise both casual and longtime readers of Lovecraft and his genre breaking horror and science fiction.
Saint Rip
Patron saint of the Catskills, Rip Van Winkle has belonged to all America, coast to coast, almost from the moment he was born, by passage through Washington Irving’s pen, in 1819. Only seven years later there was a Rip Van Winkle House along the road from Palenville to the nation’s first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House; in 1850 there was another Rip Van Winkle House on the corner of Pacific Wharf and Battery Street in San Francisco. Rip’s real-life presence was attested by nonagenarians who claimed to have known him and his hectoring dame.
Book Review
A book review of Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson
Valley by Jonathan Kruk.
ALN8BL8MO: A Native Voice
Bilingual Folk Storyelling: Pura Belpré and Perez and Martina
Pura Belpre’, noted storyteller, librarian, and writer, is placed in the context of bilingual education and public folklore in New York State.
Jubilee Sunday
A short story based on the author’s childhood in Jamaica.
Good Read
A review of the book by Margaret Creighton.
Something to Remember Me By: Maupin’s Tales of the City Novels as Artifacts in Contemporary Gay Folk Culture
The author analyzes the role of folklore by Armistad Maupin, in his series of novels based on gay life in San Francisco, CA.