Imagology Revisited

Book excerpt: 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”. 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. 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. 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 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 Americanists.