"Agent of Empire is a detailed study of creative works inspired by
the escapades of the American soldier of fortune William Walker.
The leader of several fractious, bloody forays into Mexico and
Central America in the 1850s, Walker was executed in 1860 by a
Honduran firing squad. Brady Harrison looks at a dozen works, such
as Bret Harte's novel "The Crusade of Excelsior (1887) and Alex
Cox's film "Walker (1987), to show how Walker's life and legacy
have been explored in journalism, poetry, fiction, drama, and
cinema for over a century. At the heart of our ongoing interest in
Walker, says Harrison, is the need to understand the ever-shifting
ambitions and arguments that have driven American economic,
military, and paramilitary ventures around the globe over the past
150 years. Harrison discusses how the mercenary romance, an
understudied subgenre of the historical romance first popularized
by Bret Harte and Richard Harding Davis, owes its conception to
William Walker. Engaging the work of other scholars such as Quentin
Anderson and Judith Butler, Harrison places Walker in the company
of Aaron Burr, Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver North, and other American
conquistadors. Walker and such fellow agents of empire, Harrison
argues, exemplify a peculiar merging of Emersonian inner mastery
and the American habit of equating self with nation. Inward looking
at first, they soon set their sights, as special agents of
providence or the state, on such places as Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba,
the Philippines, and more recently, Vietnam and Iraq. "Agent of
Empire is a timely exploration of American imperialism and its
troubling components of hypermasculinity, racism, and ambition.
Harrison shows how literaturehelps us gauge the ever-shifting
desires, fantasies, arguments, and ideologies that continue to
underwrite our imperial ventures, private and public.
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