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Abstract
This paper presents an outline of the works belonging to the so-called colonizers of imagination and tries to identify R. Kipling's response to the patterns of the colonial literature. His confrontation with this world of imagination springs from one of the most important cultural confrontations in the history of European empires, between imperial Britain and India, a confrontation that acted as an active and transforming force that engaged both Western and Eastern cultures in a process of mutual redefinition. Kipling's representation of India is not only a response to assert the British legitimacy of its hegemonic claims but also the effect of cultural contradictions that 'contaminated' his texts with internal tensions, ambivalences that inevitably produced moments of hybridization.
Keywords: colonization, identity, hybridity, contextualization, empire
As history has proved, one of the most influential factors in shaping the world as we have it today was the experience of colonialism. Colonialism not only influenced literature but it created a literature of its own. The question arising here is to what extent literature has reflected and absorbed the social and economic realities of imperialism. How has literature reacted to the ideologies of imperialism? What kind of heroes and heroines has it created? What kind of myths and legends has it drawn upon? How has the world of imagination received its colonizers?
Apart from a theoretical grounding in the postcolonial criticism of the colonial discourse, a better understanding of this literature also involves its contextualisation. By placing the texts into contexts, also by following the development of this literature across time and by analyzing the connections and the interrelations between different writings, we may get a more believable picture of the patterns of perception that Kipling shared along with other colonizers of imagination. Referring to the relation between the colonial discourse and history Said speaks about a certain estrangement of the colonial discourse which is defined as a representation of representations transmitted from text to text producing an unchanging stereotype of an unchanging Orient and affirming the superiority of the Western world. The colonial writer could not escape this pattern, neither Kipling did, and that is why it would be interesting to have an outline of Orientalist writing to see who drew upon who and how closely...