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. |
From inside the book
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... imperial values , Davis was perhaps the most important writer of the American fin de siècle to herald the soon- to - be abundantly realized American imperium , and his pro- nouncements in Cuba in War Time , Three Gringos in Venezuela ...
... imperial desire . If Davis called for a more truculent foreign policy in his non- fiction , he also dramatized his beliefs in his most celebrated novel , Soldiers of Fortune ( 1897 ) . A hugely popular and com- mercially successful ...
... imperial literature . Richard Harding Davis : Life , Works , and Critical Reception An overview of Davis ' life and works poses some serious chal- lenges to brevity : he had several careers , wrote scores of articles , travelogues ...
... imperial derring - do : in an odd Oedipal twist , he seems to have wanted to show that he could outdo his mother . Richard was born on 18 April 1864 , in Philadelphia , Pennsyl- vania , followed by two siblings , Charles Belmont Davis ...
... imperial attitudes and assumptions about the desirability and rightness of US interventionism , and he brought these forward - in resplen- dent fashion - to his next book , Soldiers of Fortune . After his return from Latin America in ...