Aristocratic Encounters
European Travelers and North American Indians
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:5th Feb '01
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£90.00(9780521640909)
This 1999 book relates how European aristocrats visiting North America developed an affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies.
This 1999 book relates how an aristocratic discourse on American Indians took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled and educated European visitors to North America, with the background of the French Revolution in mind, developed a new belief in their affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies.Aristocratic Encounters, first published in 1999, relates how an aristocratic discourse on American Indians took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled and educated French and German visitors to North America, mindful of the French Revolution, developed a new belief in their affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies, whom they viewed as fellow aristocrats. The book includes chapters on major figures, such as Chateaubriand and de Tocqueville, and on lesser, often instructive, travelers. For European historians, the book offers fresh evidence for the creation of a post-Revolutionary 'aristocratic' culture through overseas travel. To the interdisciplinary audience of readers interested in colonial encounters, it opens up a Romantic vision of aristocrats from two worlds struggling to defend their code of valor and honor in an age of democratic politics. Aristocratic Encounters is a contribution to a burgeoning form of historical writing; it moves across national boundaries to ask how Europeans understood cultures vastly different from their own.
"...this smoothly written, carefully constructed book is of interest to Indian historians. By broadening perspectives beyond American shores on the processes by which non-Indians have historically reinterpreted the meaning of Indianness, Liebersohn makes a contribution to a vital area of scholarship." American Indian Quarterly
"[Liebersohn's] book will interest all students of Romanticism, travel writing, and modernism. Evocative and gracefully written, Aristocratic Encounters brings to life the diverse culture of North American Indians and the images and categories through which European travelers tended to interpret that culture." Journal of Modern History
"...Aristocratic Encounters has many strong suits. It is clearly written and lacks jargon. It also possesses a creative structure." June Namias, The Journal of American History
"...the significance of this work for understanding the ways that nineteenth-century French and German elites perceived themselves and the ways that they employed symbols of the New World to demonstrate their social status in a new Europe is exceptional." The Historian
"Aristocratic Encounters is a valuable contribution to the history of travel writing and its relation to empire." Itinerario
"Harry Liebersohn has provided a compact, concise addition to the burgeoning literature on European contact with non-Europeans and European constructions of the 'other'...this book is truly European in its authorship and approach. The entire book, indeed, is a series of useful summaries of historical knowledge to date...admirable book." American Historical Review
ISBN: 9780521003605
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 11mm
Weight: 290g
192 pages