Download or read book Eclipse of Empires written by Patricia Jane Roylance and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the nineteenth-century American fascination with what the author calls "narratives of imperial eclipse," texts that depict the surpassing of one great civilization by another. The central claim in this book 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 time: race, class, gender, religion, and economics.