Summary: Publisher Summary 1 Masochism, here interpreted in a broader cultural sense to mean the desire for and glorification of suffering (in this case, for the imperial cause), is revealed to be a predominant theme in the works of many major Victorian writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. By tracing the common thread of masochistic and sadomasochistic fantasy occurring in works on colonial themes by these and other writers, Kucich (English, Rutgers U.) offers a vision of the cultural and social mores behind celebrated actions and stories that elevate suffering as the necessary process by which a hero creates a new, better world. Kucich supplements his psychoanalytic analysis throughout by providing details of the historical events and figures behind the stories, as well as noting other examples of such stories, often in the popular media. Annotation 漏2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)   Publisher Summary 2 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 Masochismputs forth new readings of this literature and shows the continued relevance of psychoanalysis to historicist studies of literature and culture.