Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving

Abstract

Every school child has read Washington Irving9s Legend of Sleepy Hollow , the story of an itinerant schoolteacher, poetaster, and rejected suitor named Ichabod Crane who witnesses the apparition of a headless horseman, that terrifying spectre whose detached cranium is in fact nothing but a pumpkin. Over the years this country9s most famous ghost story has been interpreted in many waysas political allegory, archetypal comedy, forerunner of the American gothic traditionbut never specifically as a piece about food. Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving will examine the role of squash and other edibles in Irving9s work and seek to define a relationship between the early American food story and the early American ghost story, the link between what Irving once called America9s "eating mania" and gut terror.