The colonial novel: Most popular since the 1870s till the 1930s, during the peak of the British empire. It usually records a journey by a white person, often male, to the colonies. It presents the West in masculine terms as civilized, advanced, standing for reason, knowledge, light, and presents the colonies in feminine terms as backward, barbaric, chaotic, standing for darkness, ignorance and lack of reason/control. Often it justifies the colonial conquest as a generous act to save or civilize the colonized people.
e.g. Conrad: More cosmopolitan; bold experiments in form and language; themes of honor, guilt, moral alienation, different from traditional themes. Not interested in characters succeeding in life, but in man’s responsibility to himself. Use locales and conflicts alien to everyday society in order to lead men to ultimate judgment of their nature and moral duties. Lord Jim (1900), an early work, is the first important English experimental novel of the modern era, with unusual chronology, imagistic detail and symbol. Nostromo (1904), Heart of Darkness.
I. Literary Modernism:
A. Space: moving from object, outside world which is chaosàsubject, inner consciousness