The Novel as Cosmography

Abstract

There is a sense in which every novel is a cosmographic document: a verbal structure that reflects, influences and enlarges upon a human society and individual experiences within that society. Accepted in its broad meaning, Philip Stevick’s observation that ‘almost everything one can say about Western culture from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the present can serve to characterise the [Western] novel’¹ is equally applicable to the relationship between ex-colonial societies and the decolonization novel. Unlike the Western novel, however, the decolonization novel did not simply ‘emerge’. It arose primarily through conscious acts of nationalist (both political and cultural) assertion and quests for self-definition. It was willed into being in an origination context that does not in any way replicate the Englishman Daniel Defoe’s serendipitous inauguration of the middle-class novel in Great Britain. Novelists in the (ex)colonial world made a conscious choice to harness the fictive mode as an auxiliary force in their societies’ confrontations with colonialism and neocolonialism.