Imagology

[4] In his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) he held that cultural artefacts are determined by three factors: "moment", "milieu" and "race".

[4] Imagology as the study of literary representations of national or characteristic stereotypes[7] emerged from the French school of comparative literature.

[8] Marius-François Guyard dedicated a whole chapter to the subject: "L'étranger tel qu'on le voit" ("The outsider as he is viewed"), in his book La Litterature comparée (1951),[9] which analyses novels that represent nations other than the authors' own.

This shift from essences to representations makes Guyard a founding father of imagology, which is premised on the assumption that "the images which one studies are seen as properties of texts, as the intellectual produce of a discourse".

A rift between the American and French schools of comparative literature ensued, which limited the international action-radius of imagology.

[11] Oppositional patterns such as North-South, East-West or Centre-Periphery with their concomitant stereotypes serve to contrast nations, regions or continents to each other.

Rather, imagological research inquires into the development, construction or effects of auto-images, hetero-images or meta-images an author creates in his work.

The contextual dimension targets the historical, social, political and economic background in which the text was written, since it is assumed that the author's immediate environment influences his/her representations.

[12] War between two countries, for instance, will most probably impart negative connotations to their mutual ethnotypes, while nationalism tends to reinforce the political instrumentalization of auto-images.