THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

So far I have been exploring changing ideas about literature in terms of shifting networks of cultural representations within national and European contexts. It is important to note, though, that the Enlightenment preoccupation with literature as a means for diffusing the light of reason through the darkness of ignorance – what Mary Wollstonecraft called ‘the centrifugal rays of knowledge and science now stealing through the empire’ – was profoundly entangled with Britain's escalating imperial presence. By ‘empire’ Wollstonecraft may well have been referring to the British Isles – she isn't clear – but for those who believed that knowledge, properly diffused, would have an inevitably liberating effect, this process was not to be limited to a single nation or continent. In light of this, Wollstonecraft's unspecific reference is revealing: the processes of colonialism were both an internal and a global preoccupation, premised on the same oppositions between civilized and backward states of existence, and keyed to the same developmental model of linear progression.