Image Of Africa In20^th Century English Novels

In the history of English literature, many writers have a strong "Africa complex" andan intense interest in the pre-colonial Africa, especially in the image construction of Africasince the twentieth century. Their novels about Africa enrich the imperial theme fromConrad of the colonial period to Lessing and Naipaul of the post-colonial era. Due to thefact that the authors of this area always won the Nobel Prize, there appears a growingacademic care at present.Different from those who tried to render Africa exoticism and colonial expansion intheir adventure novels, Conrad, Lessing and Naipaul, having seen all sorts of the crisis thatresults from industrial civilization, begin to pay more attention to the conflict between thewestern endless colonization under the call of material appeal and the avocation of thepreservation of the colonial primitive nature when the "sun-never-set" empire was on thewane.In their works, all kinds of the heart test in the African jungle of those white men,symbol of European civilization, become the center of the narrative. The meaning of"Africa", having experienced subversion and reorganization, is not only with theconnotation of "primitiveness" and "backwardness", but also with that ofthe novelists' ideology—a non-European "other" world.The image of Africa is unreal in the British novels of colony and post-colony. It is"the other" fashion of British culture in accordance with the principle of binary opposition,and a new reference system of self-perfection of the Englishmen. In other words, with therapid development of industrialization and the increasing human moral crises, Africa hasbecome a laboratory in a way to further examine Western civilization in the heterogeneousculture in the twentieth century.Conrad, Lessing, Naipaul and other British novelists hope a wild charm of "theUtopian Africa"to ease the English in their psychological conflicts and mental crises in the industrial age. The image of Africa in their novels is nothing but a carrier, an imaginationor a cultural utilization as well as a means of the theme representation.In the jungles of Africa, the Utopian narrative of Conrad, Lessing, and Naipaul,however, cannot escape from the failure and the disagreement between the novel culturallogic and the author's subjective intention. Superficially apolitical, a Utopian Africa in factimplies a sense of British-or Europe-centered standpoint because of their culturalidentities.This paper consists of seven parts. The introduction one centers on the researchsignificance, the history and current situation of the research at home and abroad, theproblems, and the author's thoughts and methods.Chapter One discusses the image of Africa before the twentieth century, exemplifyingShakespeare's racism in Othello and Robinson's image self-perfection in "the other"environment in the eighteenth century.Chapter Two focuses African image construction on the description, particularly byConrad, Lessing and Naipaul, of the "offbeat world" that differs from Europeancivilization, and on the criticism of the Western moral evils in the jungles from theconscience of the intellectuals.Chapter Three analyzes the deconstruction and reconstruction of the African image.Barbarous and mysterious Africa becomes the best place for the White in imagination topurify their souls. This Eden-like image of Africa is reconstructed by the protagonistpsychological projection mechanism.Chapter Four elaborates the disillusionment of African Utopia and the reflection onthe colonial culture. Though the narrative of the British novelist has a breakthrough in acertain degree, this Utopian Africa is just the novelist's self-understanding, and it isdoomed to encounter various embarrasses in both content and narrative levels.Chapter Five is about Eurocentrism, colonial discourse, and cultural influence on thenovelists' writing, which is never free from the control of the imperialist discourse.The conclusion reasserts the main arguments of this dissertation that the Britishnovelists' creation in Africa presents a changed image: a renewed self-image after an innerexperience in an exotic and "the other" land. The double cultural identities of the writersshow that the African Utopia in nature is only an illusive remedy to cure the souls of theirpeople, though, to some extent, the novelists reflect on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and make a start of cultural relativism in effect. Theconstruction of the African image in English novels stems from the examination of thementality of English nation, and it aims to form and improve the self image of Englishpeople themselves.