Colonial experience is constitutively present in canonical English and French literature.
Evidence
Gradually, it has dawned upon some that no reading of English and French literatures was possible without taking into account the constitutive presence of the colonial experience in these literatures: Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson and George Eliot, Shelley and Tennyson, André Gide and St John Perse were all implicated in it, and the vocabulary of colonial racism was there even in texts that were ostensibly not about colonialism at all – Wuthering Heights, for example. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 100
Categorization
- XREF: Extends the argument of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and connects to Edward W. Said’s later claims about Austen’s Mansfield Park specifically.
- SEED: Article angle: rereading a canonical text like Wuthering Heights for its buried colonial vocabulary as a concrete demonstration of Ahmad’s claim.