ISBN:
9780472904228
,
0472904221
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource
Keywords:
English literature History and criticism 20th century
;
English literature History and criticism 19th century
;
Litterature anglaise - 20e siecle - Histoire et critique
;
Litterature anglaise - 19e siecle - Histoire et critique
;
SOCIAL SCIENCE / LGBTQ+ Studies / General
;
Politics and government
;
English literature
;
Masculinities
;
Gender studies
;
History
;
Criticism, interpretation, etc
;
India Politics and government 1765-1947
;
India History British occupation, 1765-1947
;
Inde - Politique et gouvernement - 1765-1947
;
Inde - Histoire - 1765-1947 (Occupation britannique)
;
India
Abstract:
Effeminism charts the flows of colonial desire in the works of British writers in India. Working on the assumption that desire is intensely political, historically constituted, and materially determined, the book shows how the inscriptions of masculinity in the fictions of Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster are deeply implicated in the politics of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. At the same time, the study refrains from representing colonialism as a coherent set of public events, policies, and practices whose social, political, and cultural meanings are self-evident. Instead, by tracing the resistant and unassailable modes of masculine desire in colonial fiction, the study insists on an explosive revolutionary potential that makes desire often intractable. And by restoring the political in the unconscious and the unconscious in the political, the book proposes to understand colonialism in terms of historical failure, ideological inadequacy, and political contention. This book will interest not only scholars of 19th- and 20th-century British literature and colonial and postcolonial literatures, but also those working in the areas of cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies
Description / Table of Contents:
Reading colonial erotics -- The economy of colonial desire -- Manufacturing masculinity -- Imperial feminism in an age of homosocial colonialism : Flora Annie Steel's On the face of the waters -- Cartographies of homosocial terror : Kipling's gothic tales and Kim -- A grammar of colonial desire : E.M. Forster's Passage to India.
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