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...

Why does passion bewilder and torment so many Victorian protagonists? And why do so many literary characters experience moments of ecstasy before their deaths? In this original study, Christopher Lane shows why Victorian fiction conveys both the pleasure and anguish of intimacy. Examining works by Bulwer-Lytton, Swinburne, Schreiner, Hardy, James, Santayana, and Forster, he argues that these writers struggled with aspects of psychology that were undermining the utilitarian ethos of the Victorian age.
Lane discredits the conservative notion that Victorian literature expresses only a demand...

Are divisive political forces the source of the historical persistence of racism and its alarming reoccurence in contemporary society? Or are there more subtle and more intractable causes? This collection of essays studies the seemingly permanent racial undercurrents of society, focusing on unconscious fantasies and identities.

Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoanalysis? This groundbreaking collection of original essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. The contributors, each distinguished clinicians and specialists, reexamine works by Freud, Klein, Reich, Lacan, Laplanche, and their feminist and queer revisionists. Sharing a commitment to conscious and unconscious forms of homosexual desire, they offer new...

This collection of essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. Works by Freud, Klein, Reich and Lacan are examined.