John Kucich. Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class. Princeton, Princeton UP: ISBN: 978-0691127125. Price: $US35.00.

Twenty five pages into his Introduction to Imperial Masochism, John Kucich provides us with his working definition of the term “masochism,” which stands at the center of his analysis of late nineteenth-century literature by Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad: “From a relational perspective, masochism includes any pursuit of physical pain, suffering, or humiliation that generates phantasmic, omnipotent compensations for narcissistic trauma” (25). Broadening the definition of masochism beyond its usual associations with sex and sexuality, he is able to find it everywhere, and yet he delimits its boundaries to make it and his book manageable, cautioning: “Only the conjunction of voluntarily chosen pain, suffering, or humiliation with omnipotent delusion…. signals the presence of masochistic fantasy” (26). This immensely complex and closely argued study of British class, religion, imperialist politics and fiction thus becomes both broadly ambitious and tightly focused as it pursues its ultimate aim of providing “a more accurate reading of Victorian affective experience and a more nuanced analysis of the ideological conditions of Victorian subjectivity” (30). Drawing heavily on, but also revising, psychoanalytic theories of masochism, Kucich de-emphasizes the sexual connotations of the term that have been essential to its meaning since Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1900) and instead stresses the element of fantasy, thereby expanding the concept and making it available in a less reductive form to the analysis of imaginative literature, specifically to fiction. For his purposes, masochism is a “psychosocial language” (2) and a “fantasy structure” in which, crucially, “individual and social experience is entwined” (3). This insistence that individual and social experience is entwined via the language and fantasy structure of masochism justifies his identification of it both in the lives of the authors he studies and in broader discourses of imperialism. While he does not presume to contribute to psychoanalytic discourse per se, he is bold in his desire to establish masochism as a concept useful to the analysis of Victorian literature, scolding literary critics for abandoning the study of literature in an attempt to prove their interdisciplinarity (14) and insisting that studying masochistic fantasy has “formal payoffs” for critics (249). Beyond his recognition that masochism was first identified during the period in which his authors wrote, Kucich’s application of the concept is universalized, or at least ahistorical, in the sense that it relies on the Freudian concepts of pre-Oedipal and Oedipal trauma, and in his conclusion he confesses that masochistic fantasy is “not specific to colonial fiction” nor does it have a “special affinity for late-nineteenth century culture” (249). Yet, being universal, it is to be found there, and the book shows definitively that masochistic fantasy as Kucich defines it does pervade Victorian culture and colonial fiction from General Gordon’s death at Khartoum in 1885 through the broad selection of fictional and non-fictional writings he examines. Kucich’s methodological project here is an important contribution to literary criticism’s current attempt to integrate theory and historical contextualization. His goal to show “new ways in which psychoanalysis can contribute to historicism” (17) is admirable, and he is consistent in his balance of theoretical inquiry and historical explication of, for example, the Evangelical movement and the class and racial politics of the Boer War both in South Africa and in England. He is further ambitious in his insistence on the concept of class as “an analytical tool” (13) that intersects with the psychoanalytic category of masochism and with our understanding of the complex dynamics of British imperial culture both at home and in the colonies. In this respect he engages important works such as David Cannadine’s …