imperial possessions are as usefully there, anonymous and collective, as the outcast populations (719).
The colonial territories are realms of possibility, and they have always been associated with the realistic novel (719).
Western writers until the middle of the twentieth century . . . wrote with an exclusively Western audience in mind (721).
In reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded. Each cultural work is a vision of a moment, and we must juxtapose that vision with the various revisions it later provoked (722).
What we have in Heart of Darkness . . . is a politicized, ideologically saturated Africa which to some intents and purposes was the imperialized place . . . not just a photographic literary “reflection” of it (722).
To represent Africa is to enter the battle over Africa (722).
the novel is inaugurated in England by Robinson Crusoe, a work whose protagonist is the founder of a new world, which he rules and reclaims for Christianity and England (724).
the great spaces of Clarissa or Tom Jones are two things together: a domestic accompaniment to the imperial project for presence and control abroad, and a practical narrative about expanding and moving about in space that must be actively inhabited and enjoyed before its disciplines or limits can be accepted (724).
imperialism and the novel fortified each other (725).
The novel is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form. Packed into it are both a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference (725).
British power . . . was elaborated and articulated in the novel (727).
the novel generally, and narrative in particular . . . have a sort of regulatory social presence in West European societies (727).
novels participate in, are part of, contribute to an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies, reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions and attitudes about England and the world (728).
The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes (730).
Underlying social space are territories, lands, geographical domains, the actual geographical underpinnings of the imperial, and also the cultural contest (730).
the narrative sanctions a spatial moral order (731).
there is also a very strong spatial hereness imparted to the hierarchy (731).
whatever is good or bad about places at home is shipped out and assigned comparable virtue or vice abroad (721).
such domestic cultural enterprises as narratives fiction and history . . . are premised on the recording, ordering, observing powers of the central authorizing subject, or ego (732).
representation itself has been characterized as keeping the subordinate subordinate, the inferior inferior (732).