Soldiers of FortuneBroadview Press, 2006 M06 2 - 272 pages A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economic. A huge best-seller, the novel did its part to push the nation into war against Spain, and stands as one of the most important texts in the literature of American imperialism. The appendices, which bring together primary materials by writers and politicians such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jose Martí, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and others, address such issues as social Darwinism, masculinity, and ideas of Anglo-American superiority. |
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... close relationship with his mother , Rebecca Harding Davis ( 1831-1910 ) , and she had a far deeper influence on his writing life . In 1861 , the Atlantic Monthly published " Life in the Iron- Mills , " a novella by Rebecca Blaine ...
... close behind lay empire . ” 2 Davis , ever sensitive to the mood of his era , offers Clay as the embodiment of American imperial masculinity : young , dashing , 1 Quoted in Charles H. Brown , The Correspondents ' War : Journalists in ...
... close reading of Soldiers shows Davis to be a master of the romance genre ; it also shows him to be engaged in an odd Oedipal struggle with his mother for literary ascendancy . Close to his mother , and constantly seeking her input on ...
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