National images have been firmly established in western literatures since classical antiquity. Since the seventeenth century, these images have made an impact on the reception of the literary works in question and have influenced the production of later generations of writers. Despite this early interest of artists in national images, it was not until the early twentieth century that such images were addressed by literary scholarship. However, imagology, a branch of Comparative and General Literature, is still marked by a widespread terminological incoherence. The present study wants to help eliminate this deficit. To this end, the basic notions 'image' and 'stereotype' are unambiguously defined and made applicable for practical criticism by using the newly coined concept of 'imagene' and a structuralist model of images. The explanatory power of the conceptual framework proposed is demonstrated by in-depth analyses of five British novels of the second half of the twentieth century which focus on the United States of America and its inhabitants.weiterlesen