Colonialism and Imperialism in Heart of Darkness and A...

It is best to analyze the works, Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, applying the historical and cultural conditions of the society in which they were produced. The relations between groups and classes of people that imperialism sets up, and that these two works explore, starkly reveals the contradictions within capitalism in a way that a similar piece of fiction set within one culture and dealing with characters from that culture alone cannot. Prior to the analysis however, I would like to give a brief, pertinent explanation of the Marxist approach to the analysis of literature and of the terms I will be using. After years of study and research, Karl Marx published the first volume of his monumental Das Kapital in 1867. In it†¦show more content†¦Marx did not use the word imperialism but he did have theories about the impact of European capitalism on non-European pre-capitalist societies (Brewer, 27) and these were developed by later writers like Vladimir Lenin in his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin describes imperialism as the product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex larger and larger areas of...territory, irrespective of what nations inhabit those regions (155). Though this imperial relationship between Europe and the under-developed world as defined by Lenin is certainly detectable in the historical settings of both Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, the specific conditions, areas of the world, and historical time frames represented i n each work are divergent enough to make a more specialized definition helpful. Achille Lorias article written in 1907 in which he distinguishes between two kinds of imperialism, and quoted here from Bernard Semmels book Imperialism and Social Reform, is particularly useful: Achille Loria...drew portraits of what he called economic imperialism and commercial imperialism. The first he described as violent annexation on the part of old and well-populated states of thinly populated states which because of special conditions- tropical climate, forShow MoreRelated The Lie of Imperialism Exposed in Literature Essay3048 Words   |  13 Pagesconcerning colonialism, then a comparative study of colonial and postcolonial works is essential for attaining a full understanding of the far-reaching effects of European imperialism (Groden and Kreiswirth 582). 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