The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire

In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relations among masculinity, 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.