The Empire Writes Back – llyfr ar lenyddiaethau ac ôl-wladychiaeth gan dri Athro o Awstralia.

A ‘privileging norm’ was enthroned at the heart of the formation of English Studies as a template for the denial of the value of the ‘peripheral’, the ’marginal’, the ‘uncanonized’. Literature was made as central to the cultural enterprise of Empire as the monarchy was to its political formation. So when elements of the periphery and margin threatened the exclusive claims of the centre they were rapidly incorporated. This was a process, in Edward Said’s terms of conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of fililation (Said 1984), that is, a mimicry of the centre from a desire not only to be accepted but also to be adopted and absorbed. It caused those from the periphery to immerse themselves in the imported culture, denying their origins in an attempt to become ‘more English than the English’.