Bradley Deane's excellent and challenging new book rejects the old oppositional models of masculine self-fashioning in the Victorian period, but it still figures competition as the engine of masculine development. The models of old imperialism followed the predictable structures of the bildungsroman. In one version, as familiar as Crusoe, travel offered the necessary impetus for growth into a superior specimen of the English man. In another, the traveler (often the traveler-as-missionary) was relatively impervious to foreign influences; he encountered other people and lands not to transform himself, but to transform what he found. Deane looks to the late nineteenth century to announce a shift from internal to external models of value and valor. Simply put, “a midcentury man was encouraged to ask ‘Am I better than I was?’ but a generation later the more pressing question became ‘Am I better than he is?’” (32). Deane's discussion internationalizes Andrew Miller's The Burdens of Perfection (2008) and expands upon Matthew Kaiser's analysis of competitive play (2011). Deane joins J. A. Mangan, Steve Attridge, Patrick Brantlinger, Marty Gould, and many others in pairing discussions of masculinity with questions of imperialism. Part of what is “new” about Deane's “new imperialism,” however, is his turn to an alternative canon. His focus on “popular literature aimed at men and boys” (3) favors episodic narratives of “aggressive competition” (6) over interiorized narratives of personal improvement. Deane tracks a cultural shift away from English virtue as imperialism's major export and toward power as its primary end and means.

In chapter 1, “Gunga Din and Other Better Men,” and chapter 2, on “Cultural Cross-Dressing,” Deane draws from poetry, nonnarrative prose, and artifacts from Victorian visual culture to argue that outward signs of virility are borrowed from imperial subjects. These borrowings, however, do not necessarily jeopardize the stable English body that enables the performance. Furthermore, these borrowings can elevate, rather than denigrate, the foreign body. As he writes in chapter 1, “British manliness could be demonstrated only by engaging other men who were also recognized as properly manly” (37). (This argument diverges, he emphasizes later, from much existing colonial and postcolonial scholarship in foregrounding sameness rather than difference [150]). His next chapters turn from the work of men to the play of boys. In chapter 3, he suggests that “British boyhood was subject to the same intensity of revision as the British imperial mission” (86). The “amoral” (86) boy, perpetually basking in his boyhood, justifies a “non-developmental understanding of global politics” (86). Chapter 4 expands beyond discussions of education as a tool of empire to analyze the school as a microcosm of modes of possible resistance to colonial authority. The attractively “riotous behavior of boys” in these school stories, Deane argues, suggests the need for more “subtle and adaptable” methods of imperial control in which “natural boyish savagery . . . was not to be educated away but harnessed in the service of British power” (119). Deane's fifth and seventh chapters (chapter 6 stands on its own) draw from science fiction and lost-world narratives to trouble future models for global masculinity. With his authors, Deane refuses to announce a linear trajectory for post-Victorian masculinity. He underscores how threats of “degeneracy” (208) accompany each sign of development. In turn, celebrations of primitivism transform seeming degeneracy into potential development.

Chapter 6, “Mummies, Marriage, and the Occupation of Egypt,” is the only chapter to figure the masculine in competition with the feminine rather than with itself. The chapter discusses the tantalizing and inaccessible female mummies of Haggard and others as representing “the unfulfilled promise of Union” between England and its occupied territory (182). When the gentler sex (if “gentle” can be applied to a character like Haggard's “She-who-must-be-obeyed”) becomes part of Deane's analysis, he returns to the oppositional model of imperialist self-fashioning abandoned within other chapters. His imperialists revisit the civilizing mission; the mummy is to be wooed, carefully and politely, and her veils stay firmly in place (174). The project-expanding aims of this unusual chapter reappear in the book's final lines. Deane ends by charging future scholars to pair nonlinear examinations of the masculine with multilayered reenvisionings of the feminine.

Deane's book approaches literary texts to extract evidence for historical patterns and ruptures, yet his readings almost always attend to the nuances of form. One small exception is a fleeting reference to the Household Words essay “The Noble Savage” (1853), which Deane takes as evidence of Dickens's personal “genocidal zeal” and “vicious fantasies” (153). (Others may read the piece as a dramatic monologue of sorts, in which a critique is leveled at the illogical and insatiable relish of the English public for traveling freak shows). What is most refreshing about Masculinity and the New Imperialism, though, is its general lack of interest in passing judgment. The book's persuasive negotiations of text and context replace didacticism with power and play, enabled, as discussed, by its focus on popular literature. Readers of this book become reacquainted with a number of favorites—from Treasure Island (1883) to The War of the Worlds (1898) to Peter Pan (1904)—and are invited to enjoy them anew. Throughout, nonetheless, there is a shadow narrative that does not lose sight of what must follow the fun and games. These “amoral” boys and performing men set the stage for the global warfare that begins where this study ends. Eventually, the boys who did not want to grow up would be forced to do so.