Imperial Masochism

If John Kucich's other books and articles have not already established him as one of today's leading and most interesting authorities on Victorian literature and culture (and I think they have), then Imperial Masochism certainly will do so. This is a sophisticated and well-written study. -- Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana University Imperial Masochism is at once a powerfully analytic and integrative book, clinically anatomizing the generative psychosocial dynamics of masochism while demonstrating through a wealth of interpretive illustration their pervasive influence on late-Victorian literature. It is sure to provoke welcome controversy among literary critics and scholars of class and empire. -- Andrew H. Miller, Indiana University

Reveals the role masochistic forms of voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century British thinking about imperial politics and class identity. This book shows how the ideological and psychological dynamics of empire, particularly its reorganization of class identities at the colonial periphery, depended on figurations of masochism.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.