Publications

Publication details [#18039]

Cheyfitz, Eric. 1997. The poetics of imperialism: translation and colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 272 pp.
Publication type
Monograph
Publication language
English
Title as subject
Main ISBN
0812216091
Edition info
ISBN-13: 9780812216097

Abstract

The author 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 the final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.
Source : Based on publisher information