1. UKM Learning and Research Repository
2. PHD Thesis / Tesis PHD
3. Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Fakulti Sains Sosial dan Kemanusiaan

Title:	The production of knowledge on Malaya and Malaysia: spatial archetypes of Malaya and Malaysia in colonial and post-colonial British fiction
Authors:	Siti Nuraishah Ahmad (P48382)
Supervisor:	Shanthini Pillai, Associate Professor Dr.
Keywords:	Knowledge on Malaya Knowledge on Malaysia Spatial archetypes of Malaya Spatial archetypes of Malaysia Colonial and post-colonial British fiction Malaysia--History
Issue Date:	24-Nov-2012
Description:	Since Joseph Conrad and Hugh Clifford first began to produce fiction on Malaya and Borneo in the 1890s, up to the contemporary times when the federation of states that is Malaysia has come into being, there have been a significant number of novels and short stories by British writers representing the region in distinctive images. This study thus aims to delineate the patterns of geospatial images of Malaya/Malaysia in British fiction from colonial to contemporary times, using Jungian literary criticism that classifies such images into archetypes. These spatial archetypes of Malaya/Malaysia indicate a British collective unconscious at work, re-inscribing the land in images that do not address the lived experience of its indigenous inhabitants. Jung’s theory of archetypes, theories on colonial rhetoric on space and Spivak’s concept of 'worlding' are applied to the geospatial images found in the following texts: Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast Of The Islands (1896) and Lord Jim (1900); selected short stories from Hugh Clifford’s At The Court Of Pelesu And Other Stories (1899) and William Somerset Maugham’s short story collection titled The Casuarina Tree (1926); Anthony Burgess’ 1956 novel Time For A Tiger; Fool’s Gold (2004) by Frederick Lees; and The Orientalist And The Ghost by Susan Barker (2008). The findings of this study are organized into four chapters representing four main spatial archetypes found in the texts i.e. the garden archetype, water archetype, the forest archetype, and the home archetype. On the whole, Malayan/Malaysian geophysical space and built environment are sites onto which the desires and fears of the British are projected. Archetypes of the garden and water are often used to convey their desire for an Edenic idyll, which appears in their fiction as the lush, eroticized garden or as the disciplined garden. However, the dominant spatial archetype of Malaya/Malaysia in the British collective unconscious is the shadow-space; this is a collective archetype for the various images of garden, water, forest and home in British fiction that contain the white man’s fear, disgust, and anxiety towards the land. The shadow-space represents death, dissolution, moral or spiritual degradation and the threatening non-white (the Other) lurking in the dark corners of Malaya/Malaysia. Thus the white, British protagonists in the selected texts are often preoccupied with the act of restoring paradise in Malaya/Malaysia and with motifs of cleansing and purification, as if to neutralize the corrupting impact of the shadow-space.,PhD
Pages:	262
Call Number:	DS596 .S564 2012
Publisher:	UKM, Bangi
Appears in Collections:	Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Fakulti Sains Sosial dan Kemanusiaan

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