Elisabeth Paling Funk – författare

The Dutch World of Washington Irving tells an alternative origin story of American literary culture. In December of 1809, before finding fame with "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Washington Irving published his satirical A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. Elisabeth Paling Funk explains that the History of New York and the Hudson Valley folktales that followed were part of an early trend of responding to the national desire for a historical record. Funk argues that these works uniquely describe this part of the American scene in the period of the Early Republic and bring forward the Dutch strain in its history and culture.Funk explores what the young Irving would have read, heard, and observed during his early life and career in New York City, once part of the former colony of New Netherland, where he was surrounded by Dutch-speaking neighbors and relatives and Dutch literature. Based on these sources, The Dutch World of Washington Irving argues that Irving's Knickerbocker works—not only his History but also his Hudson Valley stories—represent a crucial effort to preserve Dutch life and folk customs in the Hudson Valley in the face of Anglo-Americanization. Providing the first complete glossary of Irving's Dutch vocabulary and drawing on untranslated Dutch sources, Funk offers cultural historians, scholars of American folklore and literature, and the latest generation of Irving's readers unprecedented access into the Dutch world of Washington Irving and his American contemporaries.

Second volume of papers from a well respected annual seminar that showcase the latest research on Dutch colonial history in New York State.New Netherland's distinctive regional history as well as the colony's many relationships with Europe and the seventeenth-century Atlantic world are featured in the second collection of papers from the widely praised annual Rensselaerwijck Seminar. Leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic critique and offer the latest research on a dynamic range of topics: the age of exploration, domestic life in New Netherland, the history and significance of the West India Company, the complex era of Jacob Leisler, the southern frontier lands of the colony, relations with New England, Dutch foodways in the Hudson Valley and their use of beer, the endurance of the Dutch legacy into 19th century New York, and contemporary genealogical research on colonial Dutch ancestors.Cogent and informative, these papers are an indispensable source for better understanding the lives and legacies of the long ago New Netherland colony.