Eclipse of Empires analyzes the nineteenth-century American fascination with what Patricia Jane Roylance calls narratives of imperial eclipse, texts that depict the surpassing of one great civilization by another.
Patricia Jane Roylance s central claim in Eclipse of Empires 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, economics. Given the eventual...