Harley Davidson Burton Essay

With this sense of superiority and right to lead as ordained by nature and God upon the British people, Victorian writers produced literary texts and essays promoting it. Scholars like Mathew Arnold, Benjamin Disraeli, Sarah Austin were at the front-burner of eulogizing the Englishness and the British race superiority. Arnold, in his Common Place book according to Evans Richard, states that the British "are the best breed in the world … The absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded skies, and a too luxurious nature … has rendered us so superior to all the world" (Evans 2). And it is the duty of the British people as having possessed a “growing benevolent” (Brantlinger 61) in the time of Pax Britannia to ensure peace and development around the world. Hence, to sustain this trend, it is important that through their teaching …show more content…
In this argument of representation, also lies the debate of whether all the Victorian writers in an attempt to reverence Britain for its achievement and power represented ‘others’ from a negative perspective. For John Mackenzie and Burton, in dismissing the view of Edward Said of the ‘Occident’s’ representation of the ‘Orient’, Burton as discussed by Bratlinger, states that many critics have faulted Edward Said’s Orientalism as “painting too negative and too literary a picture of western ‘discursive’ picture constructions of ‘the Orient’(Bratlinger 56). Mackenzie in opposing the Orientalism views, argues that “ By creating a monolithic and binary vision of the past they [postcolonialists] have too often damaged those