Contested Masculinities: Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

The purpose of this book is to explore how English masculinity, that was so contingent on the relative health of the British imperial project, negotiated the decline and ultimate dissolution of the empire by the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly, this book will argue that by defining itself in relation to indigenous masculinity, English masculinity began to share a common idiom with its colonial other.

The rhetoric of indigenous masculinity, therefore, both mimicked and departed from its metropolitan counterpart. The study combines an interdisciplinary approach with a focus that is not limited to a single colonial society but ranges from colonial Bengal, Burma, Borneo and finally to colonial Australia.