SOURCE: Morgan, Jack. “Old Sleepy Hollow Calls over the World: Washington Irving and Joyce's ‘The Dead.’” New Hibernia Review 5, no. 4 (winter 2001): 93-108.

In the following essay, Morgan discusses similarities between American writer Washington Irving's 1820 stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Joyce's “The Dead.”

Joyce's work seldom reflects the significance of America in the Irish cultural imagination of his day. This omission is most conspicuous in Dubliners, where, arguably, the presence of America as a western escape route would have worked counter to the atmosphere of arrest and enclosure, the sense of “paralysis,” that Joyce wished to maintain in the book. America does not loom as the emigration possibility we might expect it to in the often cramped lives of Dubliners characters—as it does, for example, in the background of Máirtin Ó Cadhain's stories or Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, granted that those authors...