How Does Imperialism Affect British Literature

the influence of imperialism on british literature :

Jonah Raskin claimed that The world of imperialism came crashing through the walls of the nineteenth- century novel. Old conflicts were terminated, old boundaries were destroyed, old characters were banished. A new universe of fiction was set down in their place. A revolution in the novel was effected. It was Joseph Conrad—the Pole, the outsider—who battered down the old walls. He set the clock on the time bomb of the twentieth-century revolution in the novel. His first blast leveled the old house of nineteenth-century fiction. His second ripped asunder the imperial house of modern fiction: Rudyard Kipling’s monument to the empire. Kipling’s walls hide the truth of imperialism. Conrad broke them down. He dragged the colonial world onto stage center of English fiction.

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the development of the novel

With the "White Man's Burden , Kipling draws out the need for the white people of western society to help the heathens of Africa and Asia. In this many argued that Europeans had a moral duty to enlighten the ignorant peoples of the East. Most imperialists believed that the advanced west civilizations should help lessen the burden to the indigenous people. They did this by introducing Christianity to them and spreading democracy and capitalism to the societies of these "heathen masses.  Although the new imperialists thought that their motives were to help the people of Africa and Asia, they did do this also for other reasons. One was to gain a larger reputation against the other countries in which they were in tense relationships with. This would be the most important reason to put forth their culture and societal views onto the uneducated peoples of so called "inferior 