Masculinity and the New Imperialism
Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914

This study uses popular literature to offer a fresh account of Victorian manliness as it was transformed by imperial and colonial politics.

Bradley Deane (Author)

9781107066076, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 May 2014

290 pages, 13 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

'… this is a persuasive and eminently readable book, and one that will be a valuable resource for anyone who researches and/or teaches late-Victorian literature and culture.' Nicholas Daly, Nineteenth-Century Literature

At the end of the nineteenth century, the zenith of its imperial chauvinism and jingoistic fervour, Britain's empire was bolstered by a surprising new ideal of manliness, one that seemed less English than foreign, less concerned with moral development than perpetual competition, less civilized than savage. This study examines the revision of manly ideals in relation to an ideological upheaval whereby the liberal imperialism of Gladstone was eclipsed by the New Imperialism of Disraeli and his successors. Analyzing such popular genres as lost world novels, school stories, and early science fiction, it charts the decline of mid-century ideals of manly self-control and the rise of new dreams of gamesmanship and frank brutality. It reveals, moreover, the dependence of imperial masculinity on real and imagined exchanges between men of different nations and races, so that visions of hybrid masculinities and honorable rivalries energized Britain's sense of its New Imperialist destiny.

Introduction: better men
1. Gunga Din and other better men: the burden of imperial manhood in Kipling's verse
2. Cultural cross-dressing and the politics of masculine performance
3. Piracy, play, and the boys who wouldn't grow up
4. In statu pupillari: schoolboys, savages, and colonial authority
5. Barbarism and the lost worlds of masculinity
6. Mummies, marriage, and the occupation of Egypt
7. Fitter men: H. G. Wells and the impossible future of masculinity
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Educational: English literature [YQE], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Literature & literary studies [D]