Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.

Social conflict in literature. --- Social classes in literature. --- American fiction --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

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.

English fiction --- Masochism in literature. --- Social classes in literature. --- Imperialism in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Great Britain --- Colonies --- History --- Imperialism in literature --- Masochism in literature --- Social classes in literature --- History and criticism

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants' Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. The book argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial revolution but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies and that it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialisation; servitude; rebellion; gender relations; and colonisation. After outlining the history of class relations, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Behn, Rochester, Defoe, Duck, Richardson, Burney, Blake and Wordsworth.

Social classes in literature. --- Class conflict. --- Class consciousness. --- Class. --- commerce. --- common. --- literature. --- rebellion. --- representation. --- servitude. --- social mobility.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Commonwealth fiction (English) --- Communities in literature. --- Social classes in literature. --- Cities and towns in literature. --- National characteristics, English, in literature. --- English fiction --- Community in literature --- History and criticism.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

American literature --- Working class writings, American --- Working class in literature. --- Social classes in literature. --- Race relations in literature. --- African Americans in literature. --- History and criticism. --- History and criticism.