American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:28th Sep '23
Should be back in stock very soon
What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny's dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source--Napoleon Bonaparte, the century's most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples--he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.
Elizabeth Duquette has written an ambitious, monumental book that proposes a fundamental reframing of the nineteenth century as the long age of Napoleon. Dislodging "democracy" as the nation's mythic political basis and putting "tyranny" in its place, Duquette amasses a substantial archive of America's obsession with Napoleon Bonaparte to develop a thoroughly convincing account of the multiple tyrannies that stand at the foundation of US political culture-from the actual oppression of slavery to those purported incursions on the liberty of aggrieved elites that form the "tyrannical style" of nineteenth-century political discourse. * Jennifer Greiman, Wake Forest University *
Of importance to cultural historians and literary scholars alike, American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon strives to demonstrate that tyranny is a structural threat… Strikingly enough, Duquette manages to convince us that 'tyranny is as American as democracy and, like democracy, takes multiple shapes'-a 19th-century truth that uncannily still applies to our current times, but this 'does not, indeed cannot, mean that we should not fight it'. * Caroline Hildebrandt, Miranda Journal *
In an era marked by violent con tests over the distribution of political, econo1nic, and racial power, Napoleon provided a modern template for tyranny, which he only surrendered with the emergence of Bolshevik and Fascist regimes after 1917. Across that age, Duquette shows, the shadow of Bonaparte proved almost impossible to avoid. … This may not be (contrary to the title) a book purely about America and Napoleon, but it is, for sure, one that has important lessons for the U.S. present. * Andrew Heath, Edizioni Sdentifiche ltaliane *
ISBN: 9780192899880
Dimensions: 240mm x 162mm x 28mm
Weight: 784g
414 pages