"The flag is a jealous mistress": Masculinity, Empire, Nation, and their Entanglement in Richard Harding Davis’ Central American and Pëtr Nikolaevič Krasnov’s Manchurian Fiction at the Turn of the Century

This thesis is a comparative literary study of U.S. American author and journalist Richard Harding Davis’ Central American novels written in the context of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune (1897) and Captain Macklin. His Memoirs (1902), and Russian writer and war correspondent Pëtr Nikolaevič Krasnov’s Pogrom. Roman iz russko-japonskoj vojny / Pogrom. A novel from the Russo-Japanese War (1905). The texts written during two concurrent imperial situations are analyzed in terms of the legitimization of imperial interference over territories outside the respective country’s realm. While Davis’ novels present U.S. imperialism, in accordance with contemporary political policies, as disembodied and set on economic influence, Krasnov’s text shows the Russian Empire’s main goal as being territorial annexation. In both cases, however, the desire to expand, be it territorially or economically, is inextricably intertwined with notions of a national destiny and the resulting inevitability of imperialism. What further unites the novels is that they all construct a national or imperial identity which is in constant interplay with an elaborately constructed masculinity. The thesis then concludes that while in all novels masculinity, empire, and nation are negotiated in relation to Europe and both countries positioned as in-between nation and empire, Russia is decidedly constructed as a nationalizing empire and the U.S. as an imperializing nation, which reflects the changing political system of the late nineteenth century.