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Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture,
Author(s): Patricia Jane Roylance (Author)
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication Date: 30 Sept. 2013
- Edition: First Edition, First ed.
- Language: English
- Print length: 296 pages
- ISBN-10: 0817313826
- ISBN-13: 9780817313821
Book Description
Patricia Jane Roylance’s central claim in
Eclipse of Empires is that historical episodes of imperial eclipse, for example Incan Peru yielding to Spain or the Ojibway to the French, heightened the concerns of many American writers about specific intranational social problems plaguing the nation at the time―race, class, gender, religion, economics. Given the eventual dissolution of great civilisations previously plagued by these very same problems, many writers, unlike those who confidently emphasised U.S. exceptionalism, exhibited both an anxiety about the stability of American society and a consistent practice of self-scrutiny in identifying the national defects that they felt could precipitate America’s decline.Roylance studies, among other texts, James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Water-Witch (1830) and The Bravo (1831), which address the eclipse of Venice by New York City as a maritime power in the eighteenth century; William Hickling Prescott’s Conquest of Peru (1847), which responds to widespread anxiety about communist and abolitionist threats to the U.S. system of personal property by depicting Incan culture as a protocommunist society doomed to failure; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which resists the total eclipse of Ojibwa culture by incorporating Ojibway terms and stories into his poem and by depicting the land as permanently marked by their occupation.Editorial Reviews
Review
“This book will appeal to scholars and students of American Studies and early and nineteenth-century American literature, as well as historians with an interest in transnational history and its representations within national discourses. I’d venture to say that its accessible and clear prose will make it a book with the potential for wider, nonspecialist, reading markets. The work is an important contribution to American studies. Indeed, it will be transformative.” — Eric Wertheimer, author of Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722-1872
“I am confident that this book–learned, ambitious, and accessibly written–will inspire debate in the field.” –Christoph Irmscher, author of Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science and coeditor of A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History
