UID:
almafu_9959233583502883
Format:
1 online resource (272 p.)
Edition:
Course Book
ISBN:
1-282-12968-6
,
9786612129681
,
1-4008-2740-X
Content:
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.
Note:
Description based upon print version of record.
,
Frontmatter --
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Contents --
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Acknowledgments --
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A Note On Texts --
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Introduction. Fantasy and Ideology --
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Chapter One. Melancholy Magic --
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Chapter Two. Olive Schreiner's Preoedipal Dreams --
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Chapter Three. Sadomasochism and the Magical Group --
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Chapter Four. The Masochism of the Craft --
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Conclusion --
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Index
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Issued also in print.
,
English
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0-691-12712-3
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1515/9781400827404
URL:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400827404
