The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan

by Eric Cheyfitz

Overview

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book

Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framework.

At the center of the book is Shakespeare's "Tempest," at once transfiguring the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and prefiguring much of American literature. In a new, final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812216097
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	06/29/1997
Edition description:	Expanded Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eric Cheyfitz is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University.

Editorial Reviews

"A provocative and insightful book."

Modern Philology

"A provocative and insightful book."—Modern Philology

From the Publisher

Offers both an alternative conception of Anglo-American imperialism and an alternative position from which to view it. This conception and this position move against the theories of American exceptionalism to locate the US as the apotheosis of the European imperial tradition, which Cheyfitz (English, SMU) views, originally, as having its ideological structure in the central figure of classical rhetoric: the figure of the eloquent orator. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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