Malaysia as the Archetypal Garden in the British Creative Imagination
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概要
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European travel writing (1512–1984) represented Malaysia as a tropical Garden ofEden, an image that has also percolated into literary texts concerning the region.This article examines spatial images in British fiction through the framework ofarchetypal literary criticism and theories of colonial representations of space toreveal the worlding (Spivak 1999) of Malaysia as a garden. In order to ascertain the ways in which the garden archetype has been deployed by the British creativeimagination in the past and the present, novels from the colonial and postcolonialperiods have been selected for analysis. Three dominant incarnations of the gardenarchetype can be discerned throughout novels by Joseph Conrad, W. SomersetMaugham, and Anthony Burgess: the lush, Romantic garden; the restrained,disciplined Victorian garden; and the barren, dried-up garden. The postcolonialBritish novel, for its part, deploys images of the barren garden revived (WilliamRiviere's Borneo Fire) as well as a return to the earlier Conradian image of theRomantic locus amoenus (Frederick Lees' Fool's Gold). This article concludes thatthe representation of Malaysia in various guises of the archetypal garden negatesthe indigenous worldview concerning space and produces instead "knowledge"about Malaysia rooted in the white man's perspective.
- 2014-04-24