The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment by Timothy Clark

Author:Timothy Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

How does one read the last line but one, the claim, unbalanced even if tongue-in-cheek, that the sun is subservient to Queen Victoria, empress of India? McLeod's reading overlooks this line entirely, but the poem surely becomes more puzzling here. For the poem's co-opting of the sun contradicts the whole logic of its metaphorised landscape, its tracing of a gradual welcome ascent from the sultry jungle into the cooler, pleasanter ‘British’ hills where ‘we exiles’ have retreated precisely to escape the sun's heat. ‘[T]he Great Sun himself must attend to the hail’ is a statement whose complacency throws a different light over the whole text. For a post-colonial critic to overlook a line of such literal absurdity could be taken as symptomatic of McLeod's own mode of reading: this shares with Kipling's poem the strategy of reading landscape entirely as an expression of human relationships, even if it sees those relationships differently.12

However, colonialism was and neocolonialism is, primarily a matter of the ‘conquest of nature’, the appropriation of local resources. Is it not the perversity of this that becomes legible in the poem's nonsensical landscape and climate images? ‘One interpretation of the current environmental crisis is that it represents nature’s backlash – its counterinsurgency – against the forces of human colonization’ (Eric Katz).13

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.