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Childhood's Imperial Imagination: Edward Stratemeyer's Fiction Factory and the Valorization of American Empire1
By Brian Rouleau, University of Pennsylvania
Numerous studies have appeared in recent years that deal with the reasons and rationalizations that accompanied America's overseas acquisitions in 1898. This article uses juvenile series fiction to examine how the nation's youth—boys in particular—became targets of imperial boosterism. In the pages of adventure novels set against the backdrop of American interventions in the Caribbean and the Philippines, Edward Stratemeyer, the most successful author and publisher of youth series fiction, and other less well-known juvenile fiction producers offered sensationalistic dramas that advocated a racialist, expansionistic foreign policy. Stratemeyer and others offered American boys an imaginative space as participants in and future stewards of national triumph. Young readers, the article argues further, became active participants in their own politicization. An examination of the voluminous fan mail sent to series fiction authors by their juvenile admirers reveals boys' willingness, even eagerness, to participate in the ascendancy of the United States.
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The study of the popular culture of American imperialism remains a relatively recent phenomenon. Historians have examined movies, music, travel literature, and political cartoons to make claims about the manner in which the nation's people understood their country's encounters with the wider world.2 Typically, such studies attempt to answer two separate but related questions: How did Americans imagine themselves when physically present in the globe's remotest locations and, simultaneously, how did the citizenry at large, through the outlet of mass media, envision their complicity in the imperial process? Research into these questions has attempted to resolve a central contradiction of American empire: the cognitive dissonance between imperialism and the rhetoric of America's exceptional liberty. For, in the words of one scholar, expansionism represents an interaction between a material and a cultural dynamic. Empires need stories as much as they need guns.3 Accordingly, several studies have used dime novels and other forms of mass-produced literature to advance claims about American imperialism and its resonance with the reading public.4 |
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Scholars have investigated the interaction of popular literature and popular imperialism in terms of class and gender.5 To date, however, few scholars have examined children's literature for what it reveals about the imperial mindset. Though youth adventure stories were a burgeoning genre at the turn of the century, scholars have not examined the understanding of imperialism that they contained and conveyed.6 The children's literature of any generation represents the distillation of values and concepts held in high regard by contemporary culture. Thus the study of such fiction will provide insights into the shared understandings of America's rise to international power.7 The discourse of civilization and savagery, important to both the culture of military occupation and the enactment of political hegemony, played an evident role in the rearing of American youth. Youth adventure books socialized children into their imperial roles by teaching lessons of racial dominance, xenophobic national pride, and the inherent benevolence of the American way of life. Presented to minors in some of their most impressionable developmental years, this literature provides evidence about the production of the rhetoric of empire and its reproduction for future generations of American imperialists. |
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