TY - JOUR
AU - Brückner, Martin
AB -  Martin Brückner At least since 1980, after the publication of William Appleman Williams's programmatic study Empire as a Way of Life, Americanists have engaged with the subject of "Empire" when explaining cultural attitudes and habits not only of Cold War citizens but of those who occupied colonial and early national periods. Writing before Star Wars and Ronald Reagan, Williams forged a simple and for many of us now obvious connection between imperial politics and the literary. For Williams, US culture was increasingly becoming imperial because everyday life events were subject to a "process of reification--of transforming the realities of expansion, conquest, and intervention into pious rhetoric about virtue, wealth, and democracy" (ix). If rhetoric was the explicit reality of Empire, the processes leading up to this reality were deeply bound up with literary practices. Language, form, and rhetorical adaptation translated the meaning of Empire-- that is, "the forcible subjugation of formerly independent peoples by a wholly external power" (6)--into an everyday representational lexicon; just as much as the ideology of Empire suffused formal rhetoric and creative literary expression, "it [became] habitual and institutionalized, [defined] the thrust and character of a culture and society" (4). Today, over 20 years 
TI - The Critical Place of Empire in Early American Studies
JO - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajg048
DA - 2003-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-critical-place-of-empire-in-early-american-studies-yiFbIs0edT
SP - 809
EP - 821
VL - 15
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -