Searching for Eden: Introduction

Contains a discourse on the literature of the New World - the new worlds of the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. McLaren reasons that the writers in the new worlds are forced to make a conscious choice between the forms of language and literature brought by the imperialists and those that have developed in the new world itself. While these may be the forms recovered from a pre-colonial past or forms developed during the colonial period itself, in either case they will now be marked by the experience of imperialism. This experience itself was first shaped by the interplay of language and physical otherness. The discoverers, explorers and settlers took with them concepts of the new world as a new Eden, a land of opportunity, or as a place of fear. The intractable nature of the worlds they encountered, the alien lands and peoples, changed these perceptions, reshaping the patterns of narrative and the connotations of language. These changed perceptions in turn have shaped the further development of imperialism and the literature which records it