Fictions of (Cultural) Memory: Re-inventing British Imperial Memory in Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Lord Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’

Abstract

: This study explores the representations of British cultural memory and identity in two British Poems—Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s burden’ and Lord Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, with the aim of demonstrating that, as ‘fictions of memory’ these literary works teem with a memory of British political/imperial history in the form of linguistic parameters, ideological and cultural discourses, myths, images and mainly metaphors of imperial history or what most critics generally refer to as, ‘fictions of empire’ or ‘metaphors of empire’. The selected texts from the British colonial context are linked by their historical affinity to