Content area
Full Text
The New Imperialism
Bradley Deane. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 273 pp. $95.00
SCHOLARS of the literature and culture of the late-Victorian period and the early twentieth century will find much to admire in Bradley Deane's study of manliness and imperialism in British popular fiction from 1870 to 1914. Deane covers a range of authors crucial to scholarly discussions of late-Victorian British imperialism in literature, including Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard, while he also provides new ways of reading the gender performances of historical figures such as Cecil Rhodes and Robert Baden-Powell. This study will also prove valuable for those reading literature of this period in relation to postcolonial theory, since Deane deftly disputes some of the foundational claims from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha.
The guiding insight of Masculinity and the New Imperialism is that the British ideal of manliness changed in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, shifting away from an earlier kind of developmental masculinity that emphasized restraint, self-control, and paternal authority within the domestic sphere (a masculinity discussed by James Eli Adams in Dandies and Desert Saints). In place of this restrained, domestic man, the contrasting model of manliness that Deane traces embraced violence, lawlessness, competition, and public displays of physical prowess. Late-Victorian imperial manliness was gauged not by self-development, but by the comparison among men in pursuit of honor. While the mid-Victorian ideal man aspired to increasing civilization and refinement (we might think of Dickens's David Copperfield), the ideal man of the last decades of the century aspired toward showing courage and strength among his male peers on the imperial frontier, disavowing the overly civilized position of the mid-Victorian man, a position that was now depicted by late-Victorian imperialist writers as a source of shame.
The chapters of Deane's book show how this shift in masculinity served the discourse of the New Imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Deane provides a lucid definition of the New Imperialism as "the cultural conviction ... that the Empire was the source and...