ABSTRACT
Though literature is composed or written according to native concepts of the work of art, its function and aesthetics, since the penetration of the colonial power into their borders and eventually into their minds, the native literary canons have effectively been also replaced by the western – albeit with leanings to the English, French or Spanish and Portuguese. Since then the overwhelmingly popular literary canons, especially the critical ones, have tended to be the western ones, and helped along by fashionable (and very quotable) theories they gain grounds that they have never even dreamt of before, in the new colonies of the mind. Thus, the Aristotleian idea of art as imitation, the dictum of Keats concerning the natural flow of poetry, that it should come as leaves to trees, the natural language of poetry of Wordsworth, and the structuralist's religion of sign and structure, all have found their worshippers in the classrooms and the universities of these countries.
