Amissah-Arthur, J. B2018-10-232018-10-232017-07http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh/handle/123456789/24686The English novel was born a colonialist literary production. From its earliest beginnings in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) through its nineteenth-century realisations in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1887) to its twentieth-century forms such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956), the English novel has been closely associated with the rise of the British Empire. The colonialist novel, novels written by British colonisers who came to Africa, is therefore an integral subset of the English novel. The present study seeks to interrogate the colonialist novel in order to find out how colonialism has been socially organised in the genre. We seek to discover the structural formulations that make the story of the colonialist novel possible. The thrust of the study is motivated by two key problems identified in the existing scholarship on the English novel and structural theory. First, the distinguished Terry Castle (2002) suggests that critical ideas on the early English novel have been exhausted, and that nothing new can be discovered about the novel. Second, Firdous Azim (1993) emphasises that criticism on the colonialist novel is lopsided as it stops at the social, thematic level. She bemoans the dearth of the structuralist methodology in the study of the genre. We find in Castle’s and Azim’s positions a conundrum and motivation respectively. First, Castle’s proclamation seems hasty and unjustified, especially, in the light of Azim’s observation. Second, Azim’s profound discovery of the lack of the structutalist methodology in the study of the colonialist novel exposes a gap in scholarship that must be filled. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh iii In view of the the problems identified above, the study provides a structural study of the colonialist novel with an emphasis on the story – and not on the discourse. The story of the novel represents the social matter while the discourse is the process by which the story is carried to the reader. Our study seeks to find out how the story of the colonialist novel is organised on the social level; in other words, how the structure of the story manifests in the social domain. The study is interested not merely in the politics of the story but more importantly in the structure of the story. Applying the Levi-Straussian paradigmatic strain of structural methodology, we examine a select set of seven colonialist novels, and reduce the plots of all seven texts to seven simple sentences or clauses. We then re-arrange the seven sentences to discover what formulaic relationships exist among them, keeping in mind that it is only as bundles of relations that the constituent units of a story can be combined to make a meaning (Levi-Strauss 1986). We make the following discoveries: that there is a grammar in the story of the colonialist novel; that the grammar is homological, and determines the chiasmic structure of the colonialist novel; and that there is a mirror line in the story which makes the chiasmic structure possible. In other words, the action of one part of the story is repeated in the other part, but in the inverse order, creating an object and mirror-image formulation. What this means is that the suffering experienced by the colonised African is eventually inverted against the coloniser. The significance of our study resides in its attempt to provide a new theory of the novel by examining the structural basis of the colonialist story. Our study is significant also because, by exposing the falsehood of the colonialist notion of co-victimhood, the supposed victimhood of both the colonised and coloniser, the study does not merely generate but also problematises the grammar of the colonialist story.enEnglish novelcolonialist literary productionOroonokoMoll FlandersThe Tribe That Lost Its HeadHeart of DarknessLevi-Straussian paradigmatic strainThesis