A post-colonial canonical and cultural revision of Conan Doyles Holmes narratives :: Essays Papers

A post-colonial orderical and cultural revision of Conan Doyles Holmes narrativesRedefining the British literary principle as imperial beard construct and influenceA canon, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffiin argue, is not a body of texts per se, but rather a set of reading practices.... (189). They line reading practices as the enactment of innumerable individual and community assumptions, for example approximately genre, about literature, and even about writing.... (189). The purpose of the following discussion is to ask the link between the British literary canon and its attendant culture. That culture, utter argues, was one which imperial and colonial ideology had infiltrated. Imperialism, in this discussion, will be defined in Saids words as the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory....(Culture 8). Colonialism, likewise, will be notable as representing the implanting of settlements on distant territory....(Cultu re 8). Increased imperialism and colonialism between the sixteenth and 19th centuries resulted in the creation of a socially desirable, empowered space in metropolitan England....which was connected by design, motive and development to distant or off-base worlds....conceived of as desirable but subordinate.... (Culture 61). England viewed itself as the powerful economic, academic and military centre of its empire the colonised essential was reduced by the representation of the Western observer, and of European geographical centrality to occupy a secondary racial, cultural, ontological perspective.... (Culture 70). The oppression of the native cultures of the colonized territories maintained the fantasy of the centrality and superiority of British culture.Saids argument, when combined with Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffins canon moulded by reading practices which include community assumptions (189), suggests that the bias toward priviliging its own imperial and colonial status in Britsh culture would logically lead that culture to accept texts which support its imperial centrality and primacy. Said affirms this when he argues that the culture of imperial Britain encouraged canonical cellular inclusion and exclusion.... (Culture 70).The first stage of questioning the canon and canonical texts as constructs of imperial ideology entails identifying unspoken pendents i.e. marginalised, distorted representations of colonised cultures and individuals in texts accepted by their coeval British culture. Said argues that the critical reappraisal of such texts entails reading the canon as a polyphonic accompaniment to the expansion of Europe, giving a revised direction and valence to such writers as Conrad and Kipling who have eternally been read as sports, not as writers whose manifestly imperialist subject matter has a long subterranean or implicit and proleptic life in the works of preceeding generations of writers (Culture 71).