Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities

by Dawson; Graham

• ISBN13: 9780415088817
• ISBN10: 041508881X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-12-12
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Fantasies about empire building, masculinity, and nationalism have old and long depended upon the contruction of soldier heroes. These myths have provided a sense of national community, a sense of gender, and above all, a sense of imperial politics that has, more cases than not, treated countries as maps and not as populations. InSoldier Heroes, Graham Dawson explores the making of the soldier hero mythology drawing upon the work of 19th century adventure stories. Using a wide field of literary theory and psychoanalysis, Dawson explore the construction of the soldier hero in the western imagination. He looks at books such as Scott'sWaverlyand the Victorian biography of Sir Henry Havelock, who served the British in India during the time of the Indian Mutiny Rebellion in 1857. Dawson also examines the manufacturing Lawrence of Arabia, and the cultural politics of his "becoming an Arab". He critically reads such works asSeven Pillars of Wisdom, andeventually relates the soldier hero discourse to psychoanalytic concepts of pleasure, fablation, phantasy, and memory.

Author Biography

Graham Dawson is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Brighton.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Soldier Heroes, Masculinity and British National Identity

Soldier Heroes, Adventure and the historical IMagining of Masculinities

Soldier Heroes and the Narrative Imagining of masculinities

Masculinity, Phantasy and History

The Adventure Quest and Its Cultural Imaginaries

The hero-Making and Hagiography of havelock of Lucknow: Imperialism and Military Adventure in the Nineteeth Century

The Imagining of a hero: Sir Henry Havelock, the Indian Rebellion and the News

Commemorating the Exemplary Life: the Havelock Hagiography

The Public and Private Lives of T.E. Lawrence: The Imperial Adventure in the Modern World

The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia and Imperial Adventure in the Modern World

The Public and Private Lives of T.E. Lawrence: The Adventure hero and modernist Masculinity

Public Pathologies: T.E. Lawrence, Psychological Biography and the Cultural Politics of Imperial Decline

Soldier Heroes and the Imagining of Boyhood Masculinity

Playing at War: Boyhood Phantasies and the Pleasure-Culture of War

Self -Imagining: Boyhood Masculinity, Social Recognition and the Adventure Hero Afterword: Soldier heroes and Cultural Politics of Reparation

Notes

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.