 We have seen how English language has spread across the world through such factors as migration and the educational policies of different countries .
This spread has inevitable economic, political and social implication.
Accompanying the language is an English literature which has acquired different accents and cultural flavors in different parts of the world.
 This unit looks at these various English literary canons which also carry political, economic, social and personal ramifications for the people of the countries where they have established themselves.
 Here, I explore what happens when literary texts, novels, plays and poems, in the English language, travel to and from non-
Anglophone countries. I consider the body of literary works by writers in English from non-English dominant countries.

 Such literary works are a consequence of the global spread of the English language that accompanied the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the American Empire in the twentieth and twenty-first century .
 We discover that the economic, political and military conflicts that characterize the colonial and postcolonial histories of the
British and American empires extend to the literatures and literary debates of former colonies.

 The relationship between literary canons and ideas of national identity.
 The historical, social and political motivations that lie behind the development of English literary canons in British colonies .
 The significant developments that have occurred in the nature of the canons in the countries of the old British Empire during the post-colonial period.



Some reasons authors are motivated to write in the language of the ex-colonial power .
An understanding of the term
“world canons ”.

 Consider the following points:
 The extent to which the concept of the canon , and especially the English literary canon , has promoted as a moral guide.
 The degree to which English literature has been a threat to indigenous literatures .
 The various visions presented of future literary canons .

 The concept of the literary canon has a long history, and I start by examining how it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century, was consolidated in the nineteenth century , and continues to influence how we think about literature in the twenty-first century .


 The answer to this deceptively simple question lies not in
England, but in eighteenth-century Germany , where an influential generation of philosophers insisted on the connection between the rise of modern nation states, national languages and national literatures.
 That now common phrase, English literature , is itself part of a crucial development . English literature appears to have followed these …. The sense of a nation having a literature is a crucial social and cultural, probably also political, development.
 All the literatures of Europe’s nations were organized largely along national lines, and in the nineteenth century, the process was consolidated with the publication of further national literary histories.

 The eighteenth-century invention of national literatures and their nineteenth-century consolidation continues to exert a powerful influence today. The first activity in this chapter invites you to think about whether we have moved beyond the habit of thinking about literary works in terms of their nationality .
 How do we decide which writers or literary texts should be included under the definition of English literature? The writers who are included constitute what we term the canon of English literature or the English literary canon, and my list above headed by Shakespeare might serve as a convenient shorthand for the English literary canon is the product of a lengthy and contested historical process .
 The canonization of Shakespeare:
 The conventional wisdom is that Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have always enjoyed universal acclaim . However, a more careful look at the history of Shakespeare’s journey to the summit of the
English literary canon suggests a more complicated and contradictory picture.

 Three stages in Shakespeare’s rise can be identified.

 During his own lifetime (1564-1616), Shakespeare enjoyed popularity as a playwright , but after his death, and especially in the final third of the seventeenth century, his reputation declined .
 By the end of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare was regarded as one of a number of talented English playwrights , and he contributed as one-among-many to English theatre companies’ repertoires.

 The eighteenth century saw a rise in Shakespeare’s reputation and by about 1750, he was established as the National Playwright .
Two contexts were especially important in establishing
Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, namely the theatres , and the literary magazines and newspapers reviewing his plays.


 As in the theatres, so too in the reviews, a strong sense of national pride is evident.
Shakespeare was at least the equal of – if not better than –the classical Greek and Roman writers.

Theatre audiences expanded rapidly in the eighteenth century, as the number and size of the theatres increased. The link between nation and literature was especially strong in the theatres in moments of political crisis.
Shakespeare could even serve as a secular religion, as Murphy explained in 1753: with us islanders, Shakespeare is a kind of establish’d religion in Poetry ’.
 Monuments to Shakespeare were erected in places of national importance, and Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-
Avon, became a site of secular pilgrimage after 1769. By the end of the eighteenth century, Shakespeare had become
England’s greatest literary asset, a source of unqualified national pride.


 Shakespeare’s stature was enhanced even further by intellectual developments in late eighteenth-century
Germany.
 The establishment view was that only the literature of antiquity, and particularly Homer and Virgil, deserved the title of Universal Literature.
The German Romantics attacked this view, and pressed the claims of modern literature, with
Shakespeare thrust forward as the most persuasive example of a modern writer worthy of the title Universal Genius . That
Shakespeare wrote in the English language was on barrier to these young German critics recruiting him in their battle against literary-critical orthodoxy.
 English Romantic poets and critics like Samuel Taylor happily accepted German applause for Shakespeare , and popularized his ascension to the status of Universal Genius .


 Having examined the emergence of the English literary canon in
Britain itself, we turn now to
episodes in the journeys of
English literature to non-Anglophone nations under Britain’s colonial empire.
The first is in India in the nineteenth century, and the second is in Africa in the twentieth century.

 To analyze the travels of the English literary canon to non-
Anglophone contexts requires both an appreciation of the affective power of literature, and an understanding of the social, political and educational mission of English literature beyond
Britain’s borders.
British rule in India under Hastings , from 1774 to 1785, was guided by an official policy known as Orientalism .
 In the words of one cultural historian, the goal of Orientalism was “ to train British administrators and civil servants to fit into the culture of the ruled and to assimilate them thoroughly into the native way of life.”

 However, the policy of Orientalism was challenged and gradually superseded by the alternative policy of Anglicism .
reacted against
by advocating
Western culture at the expense of Eastern culture .
Specifically, this meant that English literature was to be promoted over Indian literatures, a policy the Anglicists justified on two grounds.
First , they argued that English literature was simply better than Indian literature.
 The second reason Britain’s colonial administrators promoted
English above Indian literature was to do with their need to educate and recruit Indians to serve in the lower reaches of the colonial bureaucracy.
 The British were unable to introduce the same Christianbased education package that served the purpose of educating junior bureaucrats in Britain because of the unshakeable hold of Hinduism.

 As an alternative, they introduced instead the teaching of
English literature as a substitute for Bible-based instruction .
 The vernacular dialects of India will be united among themselves. This diversity among languages is one of the greatest living obstacles to improvement in India . But when English shall everywhere be established as the language of education, when the vernacular literature shall everywhere be formed from materials drawn from this source a strong tendency to assimilation will be created . Both the matter and the manner will be the same.
 Trevelyan argues that before the coming of the British to India,
India was frustrated by its many competing languages and literatures . Trevelyan solution?
Establish the English language and English literature as the source , models and the prototype for the Indian education system. The consequences of pursuing this policy will be positive , with the diverse Indian languages and literatures united , assimilated and consolidated .

 As we will return to these debates , it is useful to be clear about the stages in Trevelyan’s argument: ( 1 ) a negative characterization of Indian linguistic and literary diversity before British rule; ( 2 ) positive claims for the progressive effects of the English language and literature; and ( 3 ) a narrative of progress which insists on a journey from
Oriental backwardness to Western modernity.
 Notwithstanding their differences over language policy, the
Orientalists and the Anglicits shared the same ambition : to recruit literate clerks and minor officials to administer the colonial civil service.
 Satisfied that the Indian experiment was a success , British educators from the 1850s onwards also introduced English literature as an examination subject in Britain for candidates seeking entry into the civil service and the professions.


 Education policy in Britain’s African colonies had proceeded up until the 1920s in laissez-faire fashion, with missioners entrusted with the responsibility for education. However, the increasing demands of the expanding colonial economics, and the perceived failures of the existing education system to meet those demands, led to new initiatives.
 The educational policy makers in the 1920s committed themselves to greater investment in African education in pursuance of the following guiding principles: education should take into account the needs of Africans; vocational and industrial education should only be superseded at secondary level by English; religious and moral instruction should be at the centre of the curriculum; girls should have the same access to schooling as boys; and finally, a literary education should always be available to the minority who are required to fill posts in the administrative and technical services as well as.




Activity 5.4:
In a similar spirit to the nineteenth-century British colonial officials in India, like Trevelyan , who promoted the English language and English literature, so too in Africa a century later, another generation of officials made plans for educating
Africans.
Mayhew registers that the necessary economic conditions must obtain before cultural advancement can take place . He notes that the existing education system for Africans is based on teaching them the English language and English literature and culture. He acknowledges that this system of education has not been entirely successful: indigenous African culture has been neglected, and school-educated Africans have been distanced from “local and racial life”. He recognizes further that “local languages and literatures” are important , but that they have to date been subordinated within the curriculum to the teaching of the English language and literature.



Let us tease out in a little more detail a couple of Mayhew’s assumptions.
First , he assumes that the English language and literature are superior to primitive African languages and literatures.
Second , Mayhew appears to treat the question of colonial education policy as one of strategy rather than of principle.
Trevelyan and Mayhew are similar in their assumptions of British cultural superiority over Indians and Africans respectively , and their convictions that a British education will inevitably lead them to progress and advancement . Based simply on the evidence of these two passages, Mayhew differs from Trevelyan in certain respects.
First , he is more willing than Trevelyan to acknowledge the economic motives which underwrite British colonial education policies.
Second , he is more willing than
Trevelyan, as he recognizes the potential limitations of an exclusively Anglophone education model for Africans , and contemplates including elements of African languages and literatures in the curriculum.


 The military, political and economic anti-colonial struggles were accompanied by cultural resistance to British rule, and in the immediate aftermath of independence, there were efforts to replace the English literary canons based on local writers and their work.
case studies illustrate the different arguments which have dictated the constitution of postcolonial literary canons in India, Kenya and South Africa .

 Trevelyan’s and Macaulay’s plans for introducing an English education in India did not succeed in producing a docile pro-
British Indian workforce to help run the colony.
Instead, in the years to follow, there were successive waves of resistance to
British rule, from the British-Sikh and the Great Indian
Rebellion to the Quit India movement from 1942 through strikes, demonstrations and mass protests, to expel the British from
India.

 Under colonialism, English was the language of the colonialist.
It was introduced into the education system in order to create a babu class ; that is, a class of Englishspeaking civil servants who would serve the British colonial administration in India.
 Accordingly, in postcolonial India, nationalists no longer argue for the removal of English from the education system or other forums of official, commercial or technological use.
English is used by a small percentage of the population, and is characteristically the second language of the educated elite.

 Like Trevelyan’s plans, Mayhew’s education model for
Africans failed to produce an obedient pro-British workforce, and in the 1940s and 1950s, resistance to colonial rule gathered momentum across the continent. What did literature have to do with Kenya’s colonial and anti-colonial histories?

 Literature was integral to the confrontation between the
British colonizer and the Kenyan colonized.
The consequences of such an education were that African children who encountered English literature in colonial schools and universities were thus experiencing the world as defined and reflected in the European experience of history, such an education in the English literary canon therefore functioned as the cultural complement of Britain’s political and economic domination of Kenyan society, and helped to create an
African elite loyal to their British masters.
 The economic control of the African people was effected through politics and culture .
Economic and political control of a people can never be complete without cultural control.
 The streams of Western literatures would be included within a Kenyan university literary education, but only as one among many literatures.

 Of particular importance in forging a postcolonial Kenyan literary education is the inclusion of the African oral tradition to supplement modern African literature. By transforming the
Kenyan literary education along these lines, Kenyans will acquire a better knowledge of themselves, they will appreciate their own literature in its appropriate context, and they will remain connected with their pre-colonial roots.

 There are at least three complications to note at the outset in introducing the South African case study. Dating South
Africa’s transition to a postcolonial society is complicated by its relatively large white settler population. In One sense ,
South Africa ceased to be a colony of Britain either in 1910 when it was declared the Union of South Africa, or in 1961 when it left the British Commonwealth to become the
Republic of South Africa.

 In the Second sense , South Africa therefore only became postcolonial in 1994 with the first free elections after the end of apartheid. A second complications that English was not the only European language imposed in South Africa : the majority of white South Africans speak Afrikaans (derived from Dutch, but also influenced by French, German, indigenous and slave languages).
Third , like India and Kenya,
South Africa has numerous language groups and literatures within its boarders, and arguments about the bond between
Nation-language-Literature, must therefore be re-thought to accommodate such complexity.
 The search for alternatives to the English literary canon began in the late nineteenth century , a certain scholars turned their attention to literatures in African languages, including oral literatures. A number of books and articles on Africanlanguage folklore and proverbs appeared, accompanied by reviews in newspapers of new works by African writers.

 Further impetus towards developing a South African literature independent of Afrikaans or English linguistic and literary models was provided in the 1970 by the Black
Consciousness Movement.
The leading theorist of this movement is Steve Biko who emphasized the need to reserve
European cultural imperialism and proclaim African culture .
He affirmed the need for a “culture of defiance, self-assertion and group pride and solidarity.
 With the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners in 1990, and the first free elections in 1994, debates about constructing a new literature to serve the new nation intensified . The rhetoric of these debates was not always matched by actual changes in the teaching of literature in
South Africa.
 The shackles of the British colonial domination of South
Africa’s literary landscape should be broken, and a literary canon rooted in South African writing constructed.

 A second appealing aspect of Lindfors’s dream of rainbow literature is that the history of literature in South Africa has been a history of racial and linguistic compartmentalization and conflict.
 What the post-apartheid political dispensation offers is the opportunity to imagine a national literary canon that represents the literatures of all the nation’s racial and linguistic communities.

 The concerns expressed about the exclusions inscribed in the South African national literary canon have also been expressed in relation to the literary canons of other nations. One important response in recent years has been to search for ways of configuring literary canons other than in relation to the nation and national languages

 In the
, the most powerful alternative proposed to the national literary canon has been the concept of
”.
 The
conclusion one might draw from these developments is that the
 Damrosch (an American literary critic) argues that whereas there used to be a
model of organizing literature into major and minor authors, there are now
: a
(made up of the major writers); a
(made up of writers from non-
Western nations outside the literatures of the greatpower languages); and a
(made up of the former minor authors, who have faded from prominence)

 Damrosch’s judgment on the fate of literary canons will certainly not be the last word on the subject.
Viewed in historical perspective, the most striking aspect is the
have been constructed and understood: from the exclusionary national
alternatives competing for ascendency in contemporary US universities.
 In all these different contexts,
, and it continues to be at the heart of such critical debates.