In this deftly constructed and clearly argued study, Diane Simmons links together a range of imperial writing through the application of psychoanalytic theory, focusing specifically upon the idea of narcissism bestowing a sense of superiority which alternates violently with feelings of loss. This complex of emotions, she suggests, offers a frame through which to place the literature of empire. Whilst Simmons does not dismiss the material and political conditions of colonisation, she seeks to stress the psychic satisfaction offered to the literary imagination, and provides a range of readings of nineteenth and twentieth-century authors as witness to her argument. This study ventures beyond the limitations of Freudian theory by deploying the theorisation of Heinz Kohut which connects narcissism to childhood disturbance and trauma. In particular, she argues, Victorian childhood was classically marked by emotional emptiness and parental denigration which sometimes elicited a narcissistic damage compensated by fantasies of conquest and adventure at the imperial margins.

This theoretical postulate is borne out, for instance, by Simmons's account of Thomas de Quincey's appalling childhood which would lead inexorably into opium dependency and a concomitant negative obsession with a Chinese culture of which he in fact knew nothing. In the case of Stevenson, she suggests, it was the highly problematic relation with a dominating father which offers the key to his writing, not only in his poetry and Jekyll and Hyde but also in the ‘escapist' writing of Treasure Island or the later South Seas fiction and reportage. This certainly helps to account for the transgressive lawgivers such as Long John Silver or Attwater, though the religious valences of these texts perhaps need more fully articulating. This sense of imperial transgression would take another form in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and though the story is quite familiar, Simmons deals neatly with the issues raised through the home/colonial dualism of many of the stories.

There is a sense of familiarity also in her account of Kipling, but the final chapter on Karen Blixen yields many insights into the Danish writer's quasi-feudal compensatory fantasised East African adventures. In sum, The Narcissism of Empire offers a thoughtful approach to the psychic costs and potentialities of imperial writing, and adds something to our understanding of this significant and troubling cultural phenomenon.

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

More details about this book are avialbale at the Sussex Academic Press website.