Imperial Masochism

[Dave Monroe]

Kucich, John.  Imperial Masochism:
   British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.

British imperialism's favorite literary narrative
might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests
also generated a surprising cultural obsession with
suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia. "There
was," writes John Kucich, "seemingly a different
crucifixion scene marking the historical gateway to
each colonial theater." In Imperial Masochism, Kucich
reveals the central role masochistic forms of
voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century
British thinking about imperial politics and class
identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis
Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and
Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows
how the ideological and psychological dynamics of
empire, particularly its reorganization of class
identities at the colonial periphery, depended on
figurations of masochism.

Drawing on recent psychoanalytic theory to define
masochism in terms of narcissistic fantasies of
omnipotence rather than sexual perversion, the book
illuminates how masochism mediates political thought
of many different kinds, not simply those that
represent the social order as an opposition of mastery
and submission, or an eroticized drama of power
differentials. Masochism was a powerful psychosocial
language that enabled colonial writers to articulate
judgments about imperialism and class.

The first full-length study of masochism in British
colonial fiction, Imperial Masochism puts forth new
readings of this literature and shows the continued
relevance of psychoanalysis to historicist studies of
literature and culture.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8294.html

Introduction

FANTASY AND IDEOLOGY

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8294.html

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8294.pdf

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