Eclipse of empires : world history in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture / Patricia Jane Roylance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roylance, Patricia Jane.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Imperialism in literature.

World history in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 225 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, [2013]

Summary:

Eclipse of Empires analyzes the nineteenth-century American fascination with what Patricia Jane Roylance calls "narratives of imperial eclipse," in which one great civilization overtakes another. She explores how interests in such stories and texts in the United States belied a national anxiety about social problems that Americans feared presaged the future fall of their growing republic. Examining texts by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, William Hickling Prescott, Emma Willard, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Roylance demonstrates the continuing tension between ideas of American exceptionalism and anxieties about its decline. Book jacket.

Contents:

American principles and Italian things: Cooper's political gleanings in Italy

Calculating the consequences: property fears in Prescott's conquest of Peru

Inquisition: religious tolerance and Motley's rise of the Dutch republic

The vanishing Dutchman: ethnicity in Irving's A history of New York

Northmen and Native Americans: Longfellow's resistance to eclipse.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780817313821

0817313826

OCLC:

833380962