Melancholy magic: Robert Louis Stevenson's evangelical anti-imperialism -- Olive Schreiner's preoedipal dreams: feminism, class, and the South African War -- Sadomasochism and the magical group: Kipling's middle-class imperialism -- The masochism of the craft: Conrad's imperial professionalism.
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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. --From publisher's description.
JSTOR
22573/cttvvtz
Imperial masochism.
9780691127125
English fiction-- 19th century-- History and criticism.