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

by Christopher Lane

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.

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Christopher Lane is a regular contributor to Psychology Today who for many years taught medical humanities, Victorian studies, and the history of medicine at Northwestern University.

He is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016), on Peale’s self-described “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s.

His other books include The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011) and the award-winning Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007) on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders between the 1970s and 1990s.

Lane’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, TIME, Chronicle Review, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, and several other newspapers and magazines.