Increasingly, the attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices which govern literary activity and international relations are perceived in their full importance their nature as textual (frequently literary) constructs is more clearly apprehended and the necessity for a textual and historical analysis of their typology, their discursive expression and dissemination, is being recognized by historians and literary scholars. In recent years, the shape both of literary studies and of international relations (in the political as well as the cultural sphere) has taken a turn which makes imagology more topical and urgent than before.
Imagology, the study of cross-national perceptions and imagesĪs expressed in literary discourse, has for many decades been one of the more challenging and promising branches of Comparative Literature. The book is of interest to comparatists, to practitioners of cultural studies and cultural history, to scholars in the fields of ethnic and inter-cultural German studies and especially to Anglicists and AmericanistsĪmsterdam Studies on Cultural Identity 17 Serie editors It analyzes such national images as the hetero-stereotypes of Germans and Austrians in North American texts, and illuminates the depiction of the English abroad, as well as that of the Scots, the Jews and Italians in American literature.
The collection of essays, many of which are appearing in English for the first time, examines such phenomena as the mutual perception and misperception of Europeans and (North) Americans and the role of the theory of climate as a justification for stereotyped representations. The book traces the emergence of national and ethnic stereotypes in the early modern age and studies their evolution and multiple functions in a wide range of texts from travelogues and diaries to novels, plays and poetry, produced between the 16th and 20th centuries.
E-Book Overview Imagology Revisited brings together in one volume essays written over a forty-year period on the perception and representation of foreign countries and peoples, the "other".
0 kommentar(er)
