Since its first publication in 1819, Washington Irving's The Sketch Book has been most often viewed as a continuance of British literary traditions. Its early British reviewers applauded it as a dutiful child of British antecedents, one which, as travel writing on "the motherland," is appropriately deferential. This reading of the work has dominated commentary onThe Sketch Book down to the present, which continues for the most part to look at the book as Irving's attempt to position himself and his country in ways consistent with British literary tradition. However, a look below the surface shows Irving's sketches to be anything but merely derivative. Indeed, they employ a variety of strategies that subvert the colonial discourse surrounding US and British literary relations.
In recent years, various critics have demonstrated Irving's ability to deal subtly with issues of colonialism in two of his later works, The Conquest of Granada and The Life and Voyages of Columbus, but perhaps because those works deal with American imperialism, critical insights regarding them have not really been applied to reconsiderations of British literary colonialism in Irving's early masterpiece. Part of the difficulty of looking at The Sketch Book through the lens of colonial discourse theory is that the position of white settlers is, of course, different from that of non-whites under British rule, often leading us to expect--and therefore find--continuity. However, several things about Irving's text are an enactment of difference, and mark it as oppositional.
One recurrent strand of critique against British imperialism in the United States that Irving incorporates into The Sketch Book is his twisting of the standard image of Britain as father. In sketches such as "British Writers on America," Irving repeatedly figures England in seemingly conventional ways, but in Irving's text the conventional image is subtly transformed into one of decay and impotence. Also, by emphasizing the immensity of physical separation between England and the US, Irving is able to draw upon a competing ideology of imperialism that had begun to work upon the discourse: geographical determinism. Though overtly justifying British imperialism, Irving covertly challenges its basis by playing up the physical distance between England and the US.
Perhaps most important to Irving's subversion in the work is his reversal of the "colonizing gaze." By devoting the bulk of his sketches to a description of England, he is in effect claiming the position of power, reversing the positions of subject and object. In addition to these and a variety of other rhetorical markers of Irving's subversion are two important facts of its publication. By publishing the text first in America and by lavishing upon it high quality materials, Irving underlined the importance of his work in terms of his own project of literary nationalism.
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