Background
Christopher Lane was born in 1966.
Senate House, Malet St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HU, United Kingdom
Christopher Lane attended the University of London, United Kingdom, where he got his Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Christopher Lane in his 20s.
Christopher Lane
(Are divisive political forces the sole cause of racism in...)
Are divisive political forces the sole cause of racism in contemporary society? Or are there also subtler, more intractable reasons for racism's irrational power and historical persistence? This collection of essays takes the study of racism in a new direction - that of unconscious fantasies and identifications - offering perspectives from a variety of leading figures in many fields. Contributors include: Daniel Boyarin, Jacques Derrida, Alphonso Lingis, Jacqueline Rose, Charles Sheperdson, Claudia Tate, and Slavoj Zizek.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231109466/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
1998
(Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoa...)
Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoanalysis? This groundbreaking collection of original essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. The contributors, each distinguished clinicians and specialists, reexamine works by Freud, Klein, Reich, Lacan, Laplanche, and their feminist and queer revisionists.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226139360/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i4
2001
(This lively, accessible account of historical and literar...)
This lively, accessible account of historical and literary works explains why many Victorians nursed a hostile vision of man and society and how misanthropy - once a means of conveying integrity and justified disdain of society's excesses - turned immoral and quasi-criminal. Delivering a surprising new perspective on the past, Christopher Lane shows that the fanatics troubling us today share many qualities with our supposedly moral ancestors.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009G2TDA6/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i5
2006
(Lane shows how long-standing disagreements within the pro...)
Lane shows how long-standing disagreements within the profession set the stage for these changes, and he assesses who has gained and what's been lost in the process of medicalizing emotions. With dry wit, he demolishes the façade of objective research behind which the revolution in psychiatry has hidden. He finds a profession riddled with backbiting and jockeying, and even more troubling, a profession increasingly beholden to its corporate sponsors.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VEJ7VW/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0
2007
(The Victorian era was the first great "Age of Doubt" and ...)
The Victorian era was the first great "Age of Doubt" and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004QZBO6E/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i2
2011
(The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and...)
The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States during the 1950s Near the height of Cold War hysteria when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, American minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking. Christopher Lane shows how the famed minister's brand of Christian psychology inflamed the nation's religious revival by promoting the concept that belief in God was essential to the health and harmony of all Americans. We learn in vivid detail how Peale and his powerful supporters orchestrated major changes in a nation newly defined as living "under God." This blurring of the lines between religion and medicine would reshape religion as we know it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M31WEGA/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3
2016
Christopher Lane was born in 1966.
Christopher Lane attended the University of London, United Kingdom, where he got his Doctor of Philosophy degree.
A former Guggenheim fellow and a Victorianist by training, he has a secondary specialization in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history.
Christopher Lane was affiliated with the University of Wisconsin in 1992-1998. He took the position of associate professor at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998. He also held teaching appointments in London and Zimbabwe. Christopher Lane teaches at Northwestern University, where he is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities.
Christopher Lane’s The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire was called an “ambitious psychoanalytic study” by Choice reviewer F. Michel. Roberto C. Ferrari said in English Literature in Transition that the title can be interpreted in two ways. “It refers to the passion of the British to rule, i.e. civilize the heathens; on the other hand, this passion is the masculine desire which rules the men who imperialized or colonized.” Ferrari wrote that Lane defines the “British Colonial Allegory” of his title “as the socio-political substructure of soldiers, natives, and others who were united by this masculine desire. Yet the Paradox of Homosexual Desire deconstructs this same allegory because ‘representational and political mobility of homosexual drives’- masculinity and hemophiliac desire - should have united but instead destroyed the allegory ‘by invoking suspicion, antagonism, and betrayal.’” Ferrari said the breakdown of the title results in a better understanding of the work. He also noted that chapters such as “The Incursions of Purity: Kipling’s Legislators and the Anxiety of Psychic Demand” are titled in such a way as to be self-explanatory.
Ferrari found Lane’s introduction to be convoluted in spite of these explanations. He noted that because Lane begins with a socio-political examination of homosexuality in its colonial contexts, the reader is led to believe that a new literary theory will be revealed. Ferrari felt it is instead a “literary interpretation rather than a new theoretical approach.”
Lane examines the links between homosexual desire and colonialism using psychoanalysis and literature. He draws from the works of Rudyard Kipling, A. E. W. Mason, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Ryder Haggard, Max Beerbohm, W. Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, Ronald Firbank, and Saki. Among these authors were homosexuals who were soldiers of the British Empire or who traveled to military outposts, and so revealed in their writings their experiences with colonialism and homosexuality. Lane discusses colonial interaction and masculine desire in his first chapter through an examination of Kipling’s The Light That Failed, Kim, and “The Man Who Would Be King.” In the second chapter, he addresses the masculinity, or lack thereof, in the military in Haggard’s Nada the Lily and Mason’s The Four Feathers, whose character Harry Feversham, a pacifist, is considered effeminate. Lane discusses Conrad’s Victory and Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and how their protagonists exhibit a need for homophilia in Britain and the colonies. In Chapter Six, titled “Managing the ‘White Man’s Burden’: The Racial Imaginary of Forster’s Colonial Narratives,” Lane addresses Forster’s interest in interracial homosexuality, noting Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India, and also the issue of who is “tame” and who is “savage” and why homosexuality is more frequently observed in the colonies because of questions of who is “civilized.” The last two chapters on Sassoon and Saki draw on autobiography rather than the authors’ poetry or fiction.
Ferrari further noted that, though Lane states that homosexuals were a significant element of the British Empire, his book provides no proof. In Ferrari’s opinion, Lane should have introduced two discussions earlier in the book. They are Freud’s analysis of homosexuality, which Lane refers to in his discussion of Maugham, and the criminal history of homosexuality in the colonies referred to in the chapter on Forster. Ferrari wrote that “these problems hardly take away from the impact of Lane’s study, however.” He called the text “very well organized” and noted that authors and works are addressed in almost chronological order “to convey the evolution of perceptions of homosexuality and imperialism/colonialism.”
John R. Reed wrote in Criticism that Lane's “fundamental aim is clear enough. His purpose is ‘to interpret the influence of resistant and generally unassimilable homosexual drives, proposing that sexual desire between men frequently ruptured Britain’s imperial allegory by shattering national unity and impeding the entire defeat of subject groups.’ ” Reed wrote that the study “tends to drift away from its British colonial focus,” noting that Nada the Lily is about Zulus and the protagonist of Conrad’s Victory is a Swede. “But generally Lane adheres to his central argument, which seems to work best.” Reed said Lane includes “important insights with broad applications,” and extends the boundaries he explores.
The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity also received significant attention among academics. In the book. Lane examines sexual relationships in works by such writers as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Olive Schreiner. Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Santayana, and E. M. Forster to show that, in the words of Times Literary' Supplement reviewer Angélique Richardson, “psychoanalysis was crucial to nineteenth-century thought and is the only theory capable of describing the personal conflicts that desire fosters.” This thesis challenges materialist, historicist, and Foucaldian theories of sexuality, which teach that sexuality is socially constructed; by contrast, Lane argues that “sexual desire is not constructed as such, but is instead the point of identification failure.”
Many critics found Lane’s thesis stimulating and important, and his argument well constructed. Hugh Stevens, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, admired The Burdens of Intimacy as a “provocative study” that makes “many crucial challenges” to accepted theories, and that presents “masterly readings” of a wide range of material. Kathy Alexis Psomiades, in Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society similarly, praised Lane’s “eloquent and subtle readings” of Victorian texts, and deemed the book “important and engaging.” At the same time, however, these critics found some of Lane’s analyses less than wholly convincing. “In his anxiety to prove that the mind is not simply at the mercy of social forces,” wrote Richardson, “Land risks ... producing self-enclosed analyses which are divorced from wider historical concerns,” such as the emergence of physiological aesthetics, the role of New Woman writers, and the effects of social and economic forces. Psomiades pointed out that Lane’s dismissal of historicist approaches is based on “oversimplified generalizations,” when in fact materialist, historicist, and Foucauldian theories differ in significant ways. Despite such criticism, however, reviewers acknowledged The Burdens of Intimacy as a major contribution. As Richardson put it, the book “adds an indisputably novel chapter to the story of Victorian men in love and pain.”
(Are divisive political forces the sole cause of racism in...)
1998(The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and...)
2016(Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoa...)
2001(This lively, accessible account of historical and literar...)
2006(Lane shows how long-standing disagreements within the pro...)
2007(The Victorian era was the first great "Age of Doubt" and ...)
2011