The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire

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Duke University Press, 1995 - Literary Criticism - 326 pages
In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain's empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire's many layers of conflict and ambivalence.
Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others--and deft use of psychoanalytic theory--The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.

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Contents

Kiplings Legislators and the Anxiety
14
Mason Haggard and the Colonial Frame
45
The Homosexual Art of Painting
72
Masculine Identification and Homosexual
99
The Racial Imaginary of Forsters
145
Firbanks Anglophobia and the Sexual Nomad
176
8
193
9
212
Epilogue
229
Bibliography
287
Index
315
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About the author (1995)

Christopher Lane is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.