Matthew Rowlinson's 1992 essay uses reception theory to examine a poem which did not enter into the canon of literature until some time after its date of publication (1830s) as it came to be seen as a vehicle for the propagation of imperialist ideas in a late-Victorian drive to establish the English language as a world language. Its popularity, then, is due to historical developments that considerably postdate its writing and publication: the construction of an imperial ideology. Rowlinson draws on a range of critical reading strategies including reception theory, Marxist literary theory and formalist close reading in his investigation of the ways in which this poem has entered and been processed by the canon. He argues with reference to Louis Althusser's essay'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' that the'time of textuality'of this text is not the moment of its production-1833-but instead the point at which'Ulysses' and the discourse of a colonialist pedagogy (late nineteenth, early twentieth century) intersect.