RT Conference Proceedings
T1 “I Was Never So Unmanned Before”: (Emasculating) Imperialism and the Late Victorian Crisis of Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction
A1 Martín-González, Juan José
K1 Novela inglesa - S. XIX - Crítica e interpretación
AB The Victorian Fin de Siècle was a period characterized by decay, anxiety and identityfragmentation. Within the convolution of race, gender and class which was evinced in thosedecades, the crisis of masculinity outstands as being closely tied with the state of the BritishEmpire in the late Victorian Era. This paper aims at scrutinizing a series of underread lateVictoriantexts, namely Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and a selection of Arthur ConanDoyle’s non-Sherlockian short fiction, to exhibit the intimate relationship between colonialtropes and (fe)male characters in late-Victorian popular culture. In particular, the contact orconfrontation with the Oriental Other and the negotiation with a violent colonial past areappropriated to raise alarms over the perceived emasculation of British males and theweakening of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ manhood. In more general terms, the texts under analysis in thispaper epitomize fin-de-siècle doubts over whether British men were fit enough to dealwith the arduous task of keeping an ever-growing empire and specifically to confrontthe Oriental other, which is quite telling at a time when gender roles were increasinglyshaded.
YR 2015
FD 2015-07-14
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10630/10080
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10630/10080
LA eng
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 19 ene 2026