Sema Emel Goeksel

Imperial Visions and Narrations Sema Emel Goeksel

This book analyses novels written about the British India of the 1857-1947 era. The novels have been chosen according to their authors' personal experience in India and the times and themes of their concern. They are not only classic works of literature, but also valuable sources of information about the birth, rise, and fall of imperialist ideologies and practices in India. The analysis of the narrations of Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Narayan, and Scott reveals not only the effects of imperialism on the colonizers and the colonized, but also a dominant discourse that emerges especially from the English authors and seems to be strikingly parallel to the historiography on the period. The deconstruction of these myths about India and the revelation of the imperial process, especially from a social and cultural perspective, is important as some of these myths about India are still alive today.