Description
Book SynopsisEclipse of Empires analyses the nineteenth-century American fascination with what Patricia Jane Roylance calls narratives of imperial eclipse, texts that depict the surpassing of one great civilisation by another. 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 timerace, 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
