10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 s TeFanie l eThbriDge The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers Introduction “I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer in Cardigan’s Hussars; tall, masterful, and roughly handsome […] and say that it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward - and, oh yes, a toady” (Fraser, Flashman 1 13)� Harry Flashman, knighted and celebrated war hero, decorated with the Victoria Cross, introduces himself in distinctly unflattering terms� On the basis of such candour about his character, he claims truth and authenticity for his tale: “I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true” (ibid�)� The Flashman Papers, a series of novels by the Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser published between 1969 and 2005, purport to be the memoirs of Harry Paget Flashman and follow his career as “soldier, duellist, lover, imposter, coward, cad, and hero” (FM back cover)� Untypically for neo-Victorian literature and postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts, the Flashman Papers do not re-centre their narrative to tell a well-known story from the point of view of a marginalised or suppressed character, as does, for instance, Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), one of the earliest examples of Neo-Victorian writing� Instead, the series offers a re-centring by reassessing (in fact discrediting) the motives behind the actions of the so-called hero in mainstream adventure tales from the point of view of a representative of hegemonic power - the decorated soldier-hero Flashman� Though Fraser had considerable trouble finding a publisher for his story, Flashman became instantly successful when it eventually came out with Herbert Jenkins (Taylor n� p�)� The series was republished by HarperCollins in the early twenty-first century. In the protagonist’s satirical self-inspection, the Flashman Papers complicate and deconstruct (Victorian) ideals of heroic manliness linked to courage, self-sacrifice, duty, and patriotism� Throughout, Fraser reproduces the conventions and tropes of the adventure novel, only to invert its values and ridicule the patriotic or romantic sentiments evoked by writers such as G� A� Henty, John Buchan, or Anthony Hope� Apart from exposing the inadequacies and hypocrisy of the 1 Henceforth shortened to FM in in-text citations� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 298 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Victorian military, the disarming honesty with which Flashman describes his efforts to cover up his own failings also reveals the cultural work involved in ‘hero-making’� There is a sting in this type of deconstruction of recognizable genre techniques: experiencing familiar historical events through Flashman’s irreverent eyes, readers are, rather disturbingly, encouraged to root for a blatantly immoral, or at least amoral character and become complicit in his sordid endeavours to make the ‘best’ use of the opportunities life as a Victorian soldier and member of the upper class offers� Paradoxically, and not least through the attractions of the adventure form, the openly and knowingly unheroic protagonist becomes a hero nonetheless� This contribution focusses on the second volume in the series, Royal Flash (1970), which rewrites Anthony Hope’s popular adventure romance, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) with Flashman, the braggard, coward, and womanizer, replacing the noble, courageous, and chaste Rudolf Rassendyll as protagonist� Rewriting History The character Harry Flashman started his literary career as the school bully at Rugby public school and personal enemy of Tom Brown in Thomas Hughes’ bestselling Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856)� At Rugby, Flashman delights in torturing the younger boys - at one point he roasts Tom Brown over the fire until his trousers catch fire - though he is never officially reprimanded for his bullying� Tom Brown recognises him for a coward but is in no position to attack Flashman’s place in the general estimation: He played well at all games where pluck wasn’t much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff offhand manner, which passed for heartiness, and considerable powers of being pleasant when he liked, went down with the school in general for a good fellow enough� (Hughes 161) After Flashman’s expulsion from Rugby (the last we see of him in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), the Flashman Papers follow his career as a (reluctant) soldier and accidental hero through twelve volumes, published between 1969 and 2005� The eleven novels and three short stories rewrite some of the most widely known events of nineteenth-century British and American military history from Flashman’s perspective� As a young soldier, Flashman earns (unmerited) laurels as a survivor of the retreat from Kabul and the showdown at the besieged Jallalabad in 1842 (Flashman, 1969), which marks the beginnings of his life as a hero� Always desperate to dodge bullets and evade edge-weapons, he participates in the Charge of the Light Brigade (Flashman at the Charge, 1973), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Flashman in the Great Game, 1975), the The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 299 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers Anglo-American slave trade (Flash for Freedom, 1971), the second Opium War (Flashman and the Dragon, 1985), the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Flashman and the Redskins, 1982), and the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (Flashman and the Tiger, 2005), among others� Fraser himself had experience as a soldier on the subcontinent, in the Middle East, and North Africa before he turned journalist, novelist, and screenwriter (Taylor n� p�)� 2 The basic formula of the Flashman narratives is to retell well-known historical events from the point of view of a participant on the ground level and, though he tries to avoid it, often at the battle front� In line with revisionist historians of the twentieth century, Flashman as narrator openly attacks the arrogance and utter incompetence of the British military leadership who hesitate when they should act or send their soldiers to their death unnecessarily� Flashman is intent on securing an easy life of sensuous pleasures, but, inevitably, his (empty) swagger fools people into believing him to be a daring and courageous fellow, and his lechery draws the revenge either of the betrayed lover or the ill-treated woman� Thus, ironically, Flashman’s (often fake) narratives designed to cover up his desire to avoid adventure lead to further journeys abroad and ever more adventures, in turn requiring further narratives� While Flashman prefers to make a lot of noise in the back of any battle or take to his heels, he is unfailingly forward in engaging, often forcing, the sexual favours of any female within reach - both British and foreign, ranging from the prostitute or humble servant girl to the wives of fellow officers, concubines of kings or ruling foreign queens. These affairs teach him local customs (in and out of the bedroom) as well as the local language(s)� It is this knowledge and intimate contact with the locals that frequently give him an advantage over fellow British officers and army leaders - who usually do not speak the language and remain supremely uninterested in local concerns, thus often misunderstanding or misjudging a situation. Accordingly, Flashman realises what insults the British inflict on Afghan leaders and - unlike General Elphinstone - foresees that treating with an Afghan warlord will not guarantee a safe retreat from Kabul� He also understands, long before the army leaders, why the Sepoys in India are discontent� While Flashman’s contact with the native is considered ‘slumming’ by his contemporaries, this is actually a mark in his favour from a postmodern or postcolonial point of view, which would advocate an engagement with local people(s)� His relation to the natives is, however, almost inevitably exploitative. Despite Flashman’s position as a British army officer, his close contact with the natives as well as his irreverent and frequently humorous distance 2 Henceforth, Flashman at the Charge is shortened to FC , Flashman in the Great Game to FG and Flashman and the Dragon to FD in in-text citations� 300 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 from Victorian ideologies of empire and British patriotism thus frequently offer a type of revisionist ‘history from below’ or, as D� J� Taylor puts it, a “worm’s eye view of history” (n� p�)� Similarly in line with dominating twentieth-century convictions, Flashman neither romanticizes nor glorifies war: When you are young and raw and on the brink of adventure, you set great store by having your side-arms just right, because you are full of romantic notions of how you will use them� […] But when you’ve seen a sabre cut to the bone, and limbs mangled by bullets, you come out of your daydream pretty sharp� (Fraser, Royal Flash 72) 3 A blatant racist himself, Flashman’s talent for disguise repeatedly leads to his being mistaken for a person of colour and treated accordingly� For instance, on his 1855 arrival in Peshawar with news that is to save the British possessions in India, he is greeted with “What’s this beastly-looking nigger doing on the office verandah? ” (FC 321)� In such moments Flashman not only approaches the perspective of a suppressed racial other but momentarily merges with this other rather than treating it only with arrogance and disdain� In the tone of revealing the ‘truth’ behind official historical positions, the Flashman Papers pose as authentic history, a thick packet of personal papers accidentally discovered “during a sale of household furniture” in 1965� George Macdonald Fraser, as the so-called editor of these papers, claims merely to correct spelling errors and supply a few editorial footnotes to supplement Flashman’s excellent historical memory (FM 7)� This type of revelatory history gained further credibility in a wave of critical biographies that became popular after WWII in the context of “mid-twentieth-century interests in the ‘real’ man behind the public image” (Dawson 152) and a tendency to debunk empire heroes, an effort “symptomatic of a more generalized reckoning with the values, standards and ideals of a pre-1939 imperialism” (ibid� 217)� The pretence of the memoirs, reinforced by the reprint of a Who’s Who entry in the first volume, was so successful that, much to the amusement of Fraser himself, a number of the initial reviewers in the United States took these ‘memoirs’ to be genuine: “‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of” (Fraser, “Idea of Flashman” vii)� The series continued to be lauded by historians and journalists� The front cover of Royal Flash for the 1999 HarperCollins edition cites Max Hastings’ description of the Flashman series as “drop-dead funny, unputdownable story-telling, and much better history than anybody gets taught in schools”� The 3 Henceforth shortened to RF in in-text citations� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 301 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 cover of the 2015 HarperCollins edition of Flashman and the Mountain of Light presents an endorsement by no less a figure than Boris Johnson: “Politically incorrect, lascivious and fiendishly handsome, Flashman is the greatest”. The series’ charm would seem to lie in its transgressive irreverence for established codes, both Victorian and contemporary, and its knack for compelling adventure narrative� The “politically incorrect” can be taken to refer to Flashman’s unabashed racism, sexism, and homophobia� Despite these retrograde attitudes, the novels have also been praised as interrogating outmoded ideals and deconstructing established myths� As Matthew Crofts observes, “Fraser rewrites history without the patriotism and morality”, undermining Victorian illusions of “their military, their virtues, their sobriety, chastity, Christianity and honesty” (35)� Fraser himself emphatically denies any political ambitions and asserts that “the anti-imperialist left-winger [is] sadly off the mark” (“Idea of Flashman” viii)� Instead, Fraser describes himself as having “a lifelong love affair with British imperial adventure” (ibid� ix), albeit with an eye for the appeal of “the looks, swagger and style” of a glamourous “villain” like Flashman (ibid� x)� Rewriting Zenda Royal Flash represents a somewhat unusual case in the Flashman series� Most of the Flashman novels employ the format of the imperial adventure tale, recycling stereotypical aspects of the adventure narrative� By contrast, Royal Flash is set in Europe and it specifically draws on Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, even claiming the Flashman story as the direct (and ‘historically authentic’) source: “Only once did I tell the tale, and that was privately some years ago, to young Hawkins, the lawyer - I must have been well foxed, or he was damned persuasive - and he has used it for the stuff of one of his romances, which sells very well, I’m told” (RF 288)� 4 The Prisoner of Zenda tells the story of Rudolf Rassendyll, an idle English aristocrat, who travels to the small kingdom of Ruritania, located not far from Dresden� As a result of the illicit affair of one of his female forebears with an Elphberg, the ruling family of Ruritania, Rudolf looks so much like the current king of Ruritania that even close associates mistake the two men for each other� Rassendyll accidentally encounters this royal lookalike and distant cousin in the forest in Ruritania, and the two of them celebrate their meeting with a sumptuous 4 Anthony Hope’s full name was Anthony Hope Hawkins, a lawyer by profession� For an account of the enormous popularity and widespread adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda for the stage and the screen well into the twentieth century, see Watkins xvii-xix� 302 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 dinner on the night before the king’s official coronation. During that dinner, the king is drugged by his jealous half-brother ‘Black Michael’, making him unfit to appear at the coronation. His loyal servants, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim, ask Rassendyll to take the king’s place during the ceremony in order to foil Michael’s plans to usurp the crown as well as marry the king’s designated wife, the beautiful princess Flavia� While the ceremony with Rassendyll as the replacement king proceeds successfully, a band of Michael’s ruffians, among them the debonair but ruthless Rupert von Hentzau, abduct the real king and imprison him in Michael’s moated castle at Zenda� Forced to play the role of the king much longer than originally planned, Rassendyll wins the favour of the Ruritanian people and he and Flavia fall desperately in love� In an act of chivalrous self-denial, Rassendyll eventually attacks the castle with a few loyal supporters and manages to free the prisoner before Michael’s henchmen are able to dispose of the king down a pipe that leads into the moat� Rassendyll returns to England, leaving a heart-broken Flavia, who opts to remain as the future wife of the (real) king� With the exception of the resourceful Rupert, Michael and his ruffians are killed in the final showdown at the castle� 5 The king’s supporters are adamant in acknowledging the chivalrous spirit of the English gentleman, even hinting at his superiority over the man who inherits the crown� Thus Marshall Strackencz, leader of the royal guard, assures Rassendyll: “I have known many of the Elphbergs […] and I have seen you� And happen what may, you have borne yourself as a wise King and a brave man; ay, and you have proved as courteous a gentleman and as gallant a lover as any that have been of the House” (Hope, Prisoner of Zenda 69)� 6 The Flashman version of the story relocates the main events to the imaginary duchy of Strackenz (adopting the name of Hope’s marshall) in the north of Germany during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis and student revolts in Germany in 1847 / 48� On the bidding of a power-hungry Otto von Bismarck, who wants to unsettle the precarious relations between German and Danish ethnicities in order to annex Schleswig-Holstein, Flashman is lured to Munich by his former lover Lola Montez, who has risen to a powerful position as the mistress of the Bavarian king Ludwig I� Bismarck has borne a grudge against Flashman ever since a brief encounter in England five years earlier. Bismarck and his henchmen, among them the suave but reckless Rudi von Starnberg, stage a trumped-up rape charge and blackmail Flashman, who is the looka- 5 Hope’s Rupert of Hentzau (published in 1898), the much less popular sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, relates further adventures of Rupert and Rassendyll� 6 Henceforth shortened to PZ in in-text citations� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 303 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 like of the Danish prince Carl Gustav, destined to marry the Duchess Irma of Strackenz, to take the prince’s place� Flashman is put through rigorous training at Bismarck’s castle at Schönhausen and successfully takes Carl Gustav’s place, making himself popular with the Strackenz people and - after a violent wedding night - with Irma as well� When Bismarck’s henchmen try to murder him in order to create the desired political upheaval, Flashman escapes but falls into the hands of Danish nationalists, led by Major Sapten, who, in their turn, force him into a desperate campaign to free Carl Gustav, who is imprisoned in the moated castle of Jotunberg� Flashman manages to liberate Carl Gustav, but, in a final showdown with Rudi von Starnberg, he falls down the pipe in the prince’s prison cell into the icy lake� Miraculously, he manages to extricate himself, returns to Strackenz, where he steals the crown jewels, and makes his escape from Bismarck’s revenge back to Munich, where he joins Lola Montez who, at this very moment, is forced to flee from mob violence. Lola rescues Flashy, but absconds with the crown jewels, leaving him to return home without glory and without even a present for his wife Elspeth� The plot parallels between the stories are evident� To enforce the connection, Fraser also re-uses identical or only mildly modified names for the minor characters and adds an editorial note to point out the similarities: “[N]ames like Lauengram, Kraftstein, Detchard, de Gautet, Bersonin, and Tarlenheim are common to both stories […] and no amateur of romantic fiction will fail to identify Rudi von Starnberg with the Count of Hentzau” (RF 292)� More interesting than the similarities are, of course, the changes� Like all Flashman stories, Royal Flash is placed in verifiable historical context. The feature of the imaginary “cardboard kingdom” 7 as a chronotope that is both foreign and yet not too remote is kept, providing “an escape hatch from modernity into an old-fashioned, rural, and feudal kingdom in which true heroes and heroines can still flourish” (Daly 8). The fictitious ‘Black Michael’ is replaced by a thoroughly historical Otto von Bismarck, who is portrayed as the chief villain in the context of his machinations to gain control over Schleswig Holstein� In fact, the German setting perfectly complements the chronotope of the “cardboard kingdom” and resonates with British notions of Germany as a backward and rather savage ‘fairy tale country’, both in the setup at Munich, which evokes the power intrigues of an absolutist court, and in Bismarck’s seat Schönhausen in the forests of Prussia, which “looked in silhouette like the setting for some gothic novel, all towers and spires and rugged stonework” (RF 103), complete with ruffians that Flashman dubs “the Brothers Grimm” (RF 105)� In clear contrast to The Prisoner of Zenda, Flashman is recruited by 7 The term was introduced by Raymond P� Wallace, “Cardboard Kingdoms”� 304 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 the ‘villainous’ side for the impersonation of the prince� While Rassendyll helps out a momentarily incapacitated monarch to keep his rightful place, Flashman, from the start, is merely an instrument in the hands of power-hungry imperialistic foreign forces. Since he fights against these forces in trying to extricate himself from his situation, this puts him in the position of the underdog who is likely to draw sympathy from readers� In addition to Bismarck as a recognizable historical personage, Royal Flash’s equivalent of Black Michael’s captivating mistress Antoinette de Mauban is the historical Lola Montez, both in her brief career as “Spanish dancer” in London and in her position as the ruling mistress at the Bavarian court supported by student fraternities (Verbindungen) until her expulsion from Munich by an angry mob in 1848� Richard Wagner is introduced as a newly fashionable musician at Lola’s salon in Munich and Karl Marx makes a guest appearance as political agitator at the wedding in Strackenz� Despite the fairy-tale setting, Fraser’s version thus anchors the tale firmly in verifiable and fairly familiar historical events� Central, however, is the revision of the celebrated British gentleman-hero Rassendyll into the self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking and cowardly Flashman� Parody through Reversal In almost meticulous fashion, Fraser works through generic tropes of the adventure romance and reverses standard alignments and meanings: the chance encounter, the journey into dangerous foreign spaces, the duel, disguise of the hero, imprisonment and escape, spectacular rescue, the love story and return home with honour (and reward)� 8 This is not the place to rehearse all the details, but a few examples will illustrate Fraser’s technique: By the nineteenth century, the duel was an outdated mode of settling questions of honour, but adventure fiction nevertheless employed it in order to establish the hero’s superior moral standing� Where the duel could not be avoided without damaging the honour code, it helped to establish the hero’s superior skill in fighting as well as his forbearance because he does not usually kill his opponent (Wallace 8)� 9 Flashman is practised in avoiding the danger but reaping all the honour of the duel, as, in the first novel of the series (Flashman), he is forced into a duel with a fellow officer whose mistress he seduced. Flashman bribes the second to replace the bullets in his opponent’s pistol with 8 For details of these genre conventions, see, for instance, Steinbrink, and more specifically relevant to the ‘Cardboard kingdom’ adventure tale, Wallace 29-30� 9 See also Klotz 50� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 305 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 paper bullets� While his opponent, a crack marksman, thus unaccountably fails to hurt Flashman with his first shot, Flash himself fires ostentatiously wide, accidentally taking off the top of a bottle of spirits nearby� After this, he is celebrated for having spared his opponent and “at the same time giv[ing] proof of astonishing marksmanship” (FM 51), even while he refuses to pay the promised bribe to the second (who cannot make the deception public without dishonouring himself)� In typical Flashman manner, he avoids danger for himself by dishonest means but ensures a maximum display of heroics� In Royal Flash, two duels are fought which reveal both Flashman’s ill-natured cunning and a pathetic fear of pain. The first duel takes place at a country-house party in England where Flashman, annoyed by Bismarck’s sneering mockery of the British national sport of boxing, tricks him into a fight with a retired boxing champion where Bismarck gets thoroughly mauled and humiliated into the bargain� In revenge, when Flashman is held prisoner at Schönhausen, Bismarck forces him into a duel with his henchman de Gautet to demonstrate the superiority of the German “schlager” custom - and also because Flashman needs the same scars on his head that Carl Gustav has� Rather than facing his foe with courage, Flashy gets through the confrontation with self-pity and whining: “I saw the most unpleasant sight I know, which is my own blood; it coursed down my cheek and on to my hand, and I howled and dabbed at the wound […] ‘It’s not fair! ’ […] ‘I think my skull’s fractured! ’” (RF 131)� While fearing pain for himself, Flash is quite happy to inflict it on others. When, after a failed attempt to murder Flashman, de Gautet is at his mercy, Flashman takes open pleasure in torturing any useful information out of him - “showing him the advantages of an English public school education” (RF 190) with his knowledge of how to produce maximum pain with minimal effort - before he pushes him to his death down a cliff after having sworn to spare him: “foreigners tend to take an Englishman’s word when he gives it� That’s all they know” (RF 192)� The scene subverts the common alignment between the ideals of a public school education (as instigated by Thomas Arnold when he was headmaster at Rugby school and popularized by Thomas Hughes, among others) and the ideals of chivalry, honesty, and bravery that are commonly associated with the adventure hero (Esser 94)� 10 Flashman even inserts a swipe at the British, suggesting that their word of honour cannot be relied on� The rescue of prince Carl Gustav similarly reveals Flashman as a despicable and whining coward: “I should certainly be launched […] into the most dangerous adventure of my life […] trying to rescue a man I’d never met - I, who 10 See also Crofts 31� 306 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 wouldn’t stir a finger to rescue my own grandmother. It was all too much, and I had a good self-pitying blubber to myself […]” (RF 216)� The minutely developed contrast with Rassendyll highlights Flashman’s ‘yellow-belly’ (Flashman’s own term) ignominy� Rassendyll, on an equally reckless rescue endeavour in The Prisoner of Zenda, equips himself for his stealthy swim through the moat by carefully oiling his body, selecting woollen underclothes for protection against cold, and carefully choosing extra tools� He swims the moat calmly and alone, with supreme disregard for the dangers of his situation: “I remember that my predominant feeling was, neither anxiety for the King nor longing for Flavia, but an intense desire to smoke” (PZ 106)� Flashman, on the other hand, resents the “most disgusting” (RF 217) woollen underwear after he has been oiled; when crossing the moat for their secret attack, he noisily complains to his companion of cramp (“Jesus, I’m done for� Save me, you selfish bastard! ” (RF 222))� Having landed at the castle he falls straight into the hands of the enemy who shoot his companion but offer terms to Flashman� If such failed heroics might be considered excusable - after all, not everyone is born to endure pain and violence - Flashman’s sheer enjoyment of cruelty or violence inflicted by himself on others severely limits any compassion his vividly described sufferings might otherwise evoke� In fact, his feud with Bismarck only develops because he initially imagines “that he was one of those to whom I could be rude with impunity - servants, tarts, bagmen, shopkeepers, and foreigners” and treats him accordingly� His standard behaviour to inferiors is little less than disgusting� In a twenty-first-century female reader, Flashman’s use and abuse of women is likely to evoke even more profound disgust� With incredible cynicism, Flashman actually prides himself on having ‘only’ ever raped one woman in his life since he claims to prefer them “willing” (FM 105)� Yet he thinks nothing of beating women when he is in a bad temper, and he uses them as simple consumer objects� In Royal Flash, for instance, when he is newly installed as prince, he has the chambermaid brought to his rooms for her sexual services because he feels that he has been abstinent for too long during his imprisonment. Callously, after “thrashing about [with her] in first-rate style” (RF 154), Flashman has no further thought for the girl than to wonder whether the encounter lead to a child who mistakenly thinks himself the illegitimate offspring of a prince (“truly […] an ignorant bastard” (ibid�))� His wedding night with Duchess Irma initially also threatens to turn violent when he “pop[s] her on” but finds her too unresponsive and considers “smarten[ing] her up with a few cuts across the rump” (RF 183). Not only does Flashman enjoy inflicting physical humiliation; he is also fully aware that his behaviour might cause permanent psychological damage: “I’d not have been surprised if after the The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 307 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 way I’d handled her, she’d been put off men for good” (RF 184)� Rather to his surprise, however, Irma discovers her own taste for vigorous sex and henceforth adores Flashman� Flashman’s representation of events - and he is not an entirely reliable narrator - comes remarkably close to the classic defence of the rapist that women actually wish for abuse� In fact, critics tend to fall into line with Flashman’s self-presentation and admire him for his “experience and prowess” (Higdon 95), classify his activities as those of a “seducer” (Bargainnier 117), or euphemistically describe him as “philandering cad who has no use for the concept of consent” (Esser 92)� 11 To a certain extent, revulsion at Flashman’s sexual exploitation is weakened by the fact that in the end, the joke is on him� Flashman as narrator persistently deludes himself� Notably, Irma, while convincing Flashman of her undying devotion to him (“she loved me, you know” (RF 261)), apparently engaged in an affair with Rudi von Starnberg during her honeymoon with Flashy (since Rudi left Strackenz after that)� Flashman does not make that connection, even when he discovers - 40 years after his sojourn in Strackenz - that Irma’s son is Rudi’s lookalike: “she had her son with her; he was a chap in his forties […] and the point is that he was the living spit of Rudi von Starnberg - well, that can only have been coincidence, of course” (RF 289)� In a number of novels, the power relations between Flashman and his women are reversed and Flashman is shown in humiliating positions: Queen Ramalova of Madagascar uses him as a sex slave (Flashman’s Lady) and he is worn to a frazzle by the insatiable appetite of the Maharani Jeendan (Flashman and the Mountain of Light)� Flashman also encounters a superior force when he uses violence against Lola Montez in Royal Flash� Sex with Lola makes him feel like “I had been coupling with a roll of barbed wire” (RF 22), which he does not enjoy since he prefers “softer women who understand that it is my pleasure that counts” (RF 24)� Lola also retaliates “like a wildcat, screaming and clawing” (RF 24-25) when he beats her, throwing everything in reach, including the chamber pot, after a Flashman who has to flee her wrath with his trousers still off� In fact, Lola encounters him more than once as a ‘dude in distress’� On two occasions, she rescues him from pursuit: right at the beginning of the story, when he hides in her coach from police who caught him in a gambling den, 11 It is worth recalling that Fraser also contributed to the screenplay of Octopussy (1983)� Roger Moore’s James Bond incorporated a similar consumer attitude to women while he was celebrated as a hero� Fraser himself - in his role as editor of the Flashman Papers - describes Flashman’s attitude to women as “deplorable” although he hastens to point out that there were some women “for whom he felt a genuine attachment, and even respect” ( FG 392), apparently by way of excuse for Flashman’s abuse of most other women� 308 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 and right at the end, when she allows him to join her in her own flight from Munich� It is Lola’s ruse, however, which lures Flashman to Germany and into Bismarck’s scheme, in revenge for his treatment of her in England, and she nonchalantly disregards his appeals for help� Overall, and even if some women manage to gain the upper hand, Flashman’s treatment of women is inexcusable and revolting� To readers of Royal Flash, the persistent deconstruction of the adventure hero into a self-serving, cruel, at times ridiculous and frequently duped coward are highlighted in the contrast to the noble (and chaste) Rudolf Rassendyll� Within the novel, however, Flashman remains a hero because he is a master of creating narratives that describe his actions in the most advantageous terms possible� Flashman’s true nature is usually recognized only by members of his immediate family (though not his wife) and, notably, by the villain of each story who, typically, recognises vice more easily than virtuous characters do (a trope that Shakespeare’s Iago also relies on)� Bismarck, for instance, pegs him as “brutal, lecherous ruffian” (RF 107) and Count Ignatieff, an evil Russian spy, has no trouble recognising him as “a great, coarse bully of a man, all brawn and little brain” (FC 185)� Flashman, in his turn, as master of hypocrisy, can spot hypocrisy in others� Persons who witness Flashman’s most obvious moments of ignominy usually die - sometimes with a little help from Flashman himself - and thus cannot bear witness to his failures� 12 This allows Flashman to circulate a version of events that puts him in a heroic light� His main technique is actually to remain nobly silent, allowing others to sing his praises. Flashman’s behaviour in the aftermath of the fight for Jallalabad (described in Flashman) demonstrates his strategic use of silence and his reliance on the assumptions of others� In this episode, Flashman gains the undeserved reputation as the hero of Jallalabad when, after the final assault, he is found unconscious outside the city walls, clutching the British standard. While Flashman had in fact rushed to the flag in order to hand it over to the enemy just before he passed out, General Sale connects the posture with an established version of desperate battle heroics: “a handful of sepoys, led by an English gentleman, defied a great army alone, and to the bitter end”, thus protecting Jallalabad (FM 256)� Needless to say that the “handful of sepoys” are not even mentioned by name� Flashman’s carefully staged bashful reluctance to praise his own deeds only helps to increase his reputation for courage� When in threatening situations, Flashman also resorts to convincing lies about his actions, drawing freely on established tropes for the heroic 12 Kohlke discusses this phenomenon with reference to Flashman and the Dragon in more detail (“Killing Humour” 88)� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 309 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 English gentleman and, again, leaving his interlocutors to fill in the gaps. Thus, for instance, when the Danish freedom fighters capture him in Royal Flash, he gives his name as Thomas Arnold and tells a moving story of how Bismarck’s ruffians kidnapped his wife and child, the “little golden-headed Amelia” (RF 206), in order to blackmail him into impersonating the prince� He also enacts a furious denial when it is suggested that during their week of marriage (technically bigamy, since Flashman is already married) he was intimate with the Duchess Irma, which the reader, of course, knows to be all too true: “‘I am not so dead to honour,’ says I, trying to look noble and angry together, ‘that I would stoop to carry my imposture as far as that� There are some things that no gentleman …’ And I broke off as though it was too much for me” (RF 208)� Technically, of course, Flashman does not even tell a lie here� Carefully gauging the impact of controlled (manly) emotion, Flashman is distinctly pleased with his acting abilities, comparing himself to one of the most successful actors of the Victorian age: “This chap Irving has nothing on me! ” (RF 261)� 13 In fact, Rudi von Starnberg refers to Flashman as “the play-actor” throughout most of the novel, emphasizing both his skill in impersonating the prince and the pretence of his position� When Flashman returns to Strackenz to steal the crown jewels, he spins a tale of love and duty to Irma: “I would not go, but I must - and you must remember that you are a duchess, and the protector of your people - and, and all that� Now will you trust me, and believe me that I do this for the safety of Strackenz and my own darling? ” Irma readily accepts her role in this framework: “These royal wenches are made of stern stuff, of course; tell ’em it’s for their country’s sake and they become all proudly dutiful and think they’re Joan of Arc” (RF 260-261)� This is the Flashman version of Flavia’s heartrending self-denial when she decides to serve her country rather than follow Rassendyll back to England: “My honour lies in being true to my country and my House� I don’t know why God has let me love you; but I know that I must stay” (PZ 132-133)� The strength of Flashman’s position relies on the fact that everyone around him readily recalls the ingredients of a standard hero narrative� All Flashman needs to do is deliver a few easily recognizable cues to make others interpret his actions according to story-book rules� Flashman’s adept use of recognizable poses of the melodramatic stage or adventure romance to disguise his self-serving behaviour casts a general suspicion on rhetoric that sounds the high pathos of duty and self-sacrifice. As Joseph Kestner has argued, The Prisoner of Zenda already dwells on the 13 Incidentally, one of Irving’s specialties was the role of the role of the villain-hero (Poore 3)� 310 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 performative aspects of heroic masculinity: “Hope repeatedly refers to Rassendyll’s function as playing a role, suggesting that after all masculinity, even royalty, is a question of role-playing, not actuality” (155)� In The Prisoner of Zenda, however, performance clearly works as a teaching tool and the formerly irresponsible king actually learns from the gentleman play-actor: “You have shown me how to play the king” (PZ 130), he explains to the departing Rassendyll, determined to follow his example as a king who cares for his subjects� Initially a role-player, Rassendyll becomes a role model� Flashman, on the other hand, performs both duty and emotion entirely as a front for his personal gain, discrediting the concepts themselves� The fact that social interaction is a game just like poker, which requires some luck but mostly good tactics and the ability to bluff (and possibly cheat), is brought out by the novel’s title, of course, which plays on the ‘royal flush’ hand in poker, but also in constant references to card games throughout the story� Thus Flashman, when pushed into a corner in front of the magistrate after the false rape charge, regretfully has to admit to himself that he has been “robbed of the two cards” he normally plays in a crisis: whining and blustering (RF 98). Even more significantly, Lola Montez’ life motto, “Courage! And shuffle the cards” (RF 287), brings home Flashman’s final humiliation when she takes off with the stolen jewels, having cheated the cheater� The card game metaphor subverts the widely accepted ideal of ‘fair play’ associated with the English gentleman� Public schools in particular encouraged sports games because “such games helped form valuable social qualities and masculine virtues” (Watkins xii)� It is no accident that Tom Brown characterises Flashman first and foremost via his performance on the playing field. While Rassendyll throws himself into the game of impersonating the king with Newbolt-like enthusiasm to “Play up! Play up! and play the game! ”, Flashman is happy to play whenever he holds a winning hand and prefers to cheat if not� With the clear discrepancy between performance and being, Fraser discredits the concepts of duty, dedication, chivalry, or self-denial as - potentially - mere hypocrisy, revealing, as other neo-Victorian writers have done, their construction through narrative (Carroll 182)� With this move, the “chivalrous gentleman, a concept central to Hope’s portrait of masculinity, is re-presented as hardly more than an affectation in an age of hubris and chance” (Esser 84)� Whether he intended to or not, with his parody of the adventure hero, Fraser necessarily questions ideological implications that are written on and into the adventure format� “Flashman’s papers stand in relationship to Hughes’ novel in much the same way that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies does to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, as an assault on its moral and ethical assumptions about man and society” (Higdon 89)� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 311 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 This assault goes further than merely discrediting the Victorian hero-rhetoric as wholesale hypocrisy� On the contrary, Flashman continues to depict those who honestly believe in the type of muscular Christianity that Thomas Hughes had propagated, but he clearly feels that they do more harm than good� They either turn out self-deceiving and basically ineffectual leaders (like Elphinstone, Havelock, or Cardigan, portrayed in various Flashman novels) or a positive danger to people who wish to survive a war that other people started� One such dutiful soldier is Scud East, close friend to Tom Brown in Hughes’s novel, whom Flashman meets during the Crimean War, and whose plan for escape threatens Flashman’s comfortable enjoyment of a fairly easy imprisonment in Russia with regular helpings of the sexual favours of the prison keeper’s daughter: I know my Easts and Tom Browns, you see� They’re never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace, and they can feel they’re doing the right, Christian thing - and never mind the consequences to anyone else. Selfish brutes. […] They’ll do for us yet, with their sentiment and morality� (FC 222) These observations are all the more pertinent since earlier in the novel Flashman visits a field hospital and is visibly distressed at the sight of the mangled bodies of common soldiers who had been sent off “stuffed with lies and rubbish, to get killed and maimed for nothing except a politician’s vanity or a manufacturer’s profit” (FC 135-136)� On the one hand comically undermined as admirable hero, even made despicable as sexist, racist, greedy and amoral, Flashman on the other hand defends views that are likely to resonate with a late twentiethor early twenty-first-century audience, such as a thorough scepticism of empire ideology and the honour code that was (reputedly) fostered to prepare youngsters for war� In Royal Flash specifically, which does not take place in an Empire setting with a clearly marked racial other, we see less of Flashman’s racism and also less self-congratulation about British superiority than in other Flashman novels� Despite his cowardice and sexual abuse, Flashman is thus a deeply ambivalent protagonist, offering a confirmation of liberal twentiethand twenty-first-century views as well as representing everything such a liberal would reject� In fact, it is this curious pull into two opposing directions through conflicting characterisation, the use and subversion of the classic adventure plot, and the focalisation through the unscrupulous Flashman, that make the narratives a fascinating phenomenon� 312 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 The Lure of the Villain, or, the Perils of Pleasure It is worth disentangling the fairly complicated and contradictory interplay of revulsion and identification that Flashman offers a modern audience. While the character, considered in the rational light of day, must appear despicable even to an only moderately liberal reader, the irreverent assessment of Victorian mores from the point of view of this anti-hero as well as the suspense of the adventure plot make this, rather worryingly, an “engaging” tale nonetheless (Helena Esser’s adjective to describe Royal Flash (82))� Addressing the question of how a reader can possibly “like a coward, a cynic, a seducer, and a rogue” (117), Earl F� Bargainnier cites Flashman’s candour and his humour: “His sheer honesty about himself is disarming and ingratiating� […] The second reason for liking him is his sense of humor” (117-118)� Flashman’s superior insight into and sardonic exposure of the cultural myth-making the Victorians indulged in makes it quite easy not only to laugh about him but to laugh with him and thus to share his sense of superiority over his self-deluded fellow-Victorians� As Benjamin Poore points out, Neo-Victorianism draws on cultural assumptions that turn the Victorians into “history’s villains” (17); they have become a convenient short-form for anything that we “rigorously seek to exclude from the liberal and ‘liberated’ ideal of postmodern identity” (Kohlke and Gutleben 11)� Ranging from imperialism to sexual repression, from the exploitation of the labouring classes to racism, sexism or large-scale ecological destruction, there are few inequities that the twentiethand twenty-first-centuries do not trace back to their nineteenth-century forebears. Seeing the Victorians exposed as mere self-serving hypocrites, like Flashman and through Flashman, in the end confirms what we have known all along and with this, the Flashman Papers confirm a sense of our own cultural and ideological superiority� The account of Flashman’s sexual adventures even offers a chance to sexually liberate the Victorians, a popular trope in Neo-Victorian writing, adding a form of voyeuristic “sexsation” to the representation of people that are still popularly considered to be so very prude and repressed (Kohlke, “Sexsation”)� All of this is made more pertinent by the detailed historical connections, suggesting sensational revelations about ‘real’ persons, something that was paralleled by trends in historiography which, from the late 1950s onwards, was particularly fascinated with the sexuality of Victorian heroes, especially empire heroes like T� E� Lawrence or General Gordon (Jones 179)� Apart from offering a platform for fantasies of sexist and racist violence for those who regret the loss of such opportunities in an age that insists on “political correctness”, the worse Flashman turns out to be, the more he confirms The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 313 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 twentieth-century liberal outrage about the Victorians� In a curious sense, this can be liberating for readers of adventure tales who are often vaguely ashamed of deriving pleasure from cultural memes that tend to be associated with young adult reading or with the ‘wrong’ ideology� Martin Green practically equates the Victorian adventure tale with empire ideology: “The adventure form carries its own imperialist message, despite the individual artist’s intention” (335), and Mark Girouard aligns the chivalric code propagated in adventure narratives with elitism and imperialism (260-261)� While we are self-righteously repelled by Flashman’s exploitative conduct, we can read a ripping adventure tale without apparently condoning the ideology that comes with it� As one reviewer had it: The Flashman Papers offer “a considerate sort of parody that allows a double-tracking reader to enjoy his old chestnuts even while he roasts them” (Melvin Maddocks on Royal Flash, qtd� in Higdon 93)� At the same time, Flashman frequently offers sardonic remarks that might well apply to twentiethand twenty-first-century conditions, for instance a series of pejorative comments about royalty� When Flashman, for example, pities Prince Albert’s inferior position as prince consort, this parallels the situation of Prince Philip as consort to Queen Elizabeth II, a source of tension that is played out, for instance, in the popular Netflix series The Crown: “He’s always one step behind his adoring spouse, and even if she dotes on him […] he still has to get his own way, if he wants it, through her good leave� […] God knows how our late lamented Albert stuck it out, poor devil” (RF 186)� For the early twenty-first-century reader - when the Flashman novels were all reprinted - Flashman’s sneer against Edward, the Prince of Wales’s general clumsiness and inability to extricate himself from the unpleasant consequences of his sexual adventures might well ring familiar in the context of similar antics in the current royal family, from Prince Charles’s extramarital connections (and published telephone conversations) with Camilla Parker-Bowles to Prince Andrew’s involvement in the Epstein circle: I […] wondered why people will make such a fuss over royalty� It’s the same with us; we have our tubby little Teddy, whom everyone pretends is the first gentleman of Europe, with all the virtues, when they know quite well he’s just a vicious old rake - rather like me but lacking my talent for being agreeable to order� Anyway, I was aboard Lily Langtry long before he was� (RF 162) While Hope’s Rassendyll stresses the responsibility of rulership, Flashman’s blissful indulgence in the pleasures that come with being a prince amusingly feeds into a discourse of class envy and anti-royalism: 314 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Sumptuous wasn’t the word for them - silk sheets, lace pillow, solid silver cup and plate by the bed […] even the pot under the bed was of the best china […]� Well, thinks I, they may talk about cares of state, and uneasy lies the head and all that tommy-rot, but […] you may take my word for it, next time you hear about the burdens of monarchy, that royalty do themselves damned proud� (RF 152) In the context of the royal family’s efforts to gain more popular support at the time of the novel’s publication, remarks like this resonate with discussions about the justification of monarchy - then and now. Flashman on the one hand as typical Victorian villain, on the other as spokesperson for past and present social inequities, thus offers an ambivalent appeal� If Flashman’s ruthless exposure of past and present hypocrisy reinforces stereotypical vilifications of Victorians (and / or royals), the late twentieth-century entertainment industry has actually accustomed audiences to a degree of sympathy for the villain� Media trends of the last 50 years have offered a large number of villains in place of somewhat outworn heroes - whether this is the pitied monster (in Shrek), the rehabilitated vampire (in Twilight), or the marginalised character forced into evil (in Joaquin Phoenix’ Joker)� 14 While morality - and especially the type of moral codes that are associated with chivalrous Victorian heroes - have become suspect, enjoying the transgressions of a villain has become the mark of viewer sophistication, who, rather than falling for the simplistic ideals represented by the hero, indulge in the complicated and conflicting motivations of the anti-hero, the hero-villain or the villain: “This recent set of cultural protocols, which can sometimes feel like the celebration and aestheticisation of a cool amorality (or at least, extreme moral relativism) serves to demarcate which aspects of popular culture have an ‘adult’ dimension” (Poore 12)� A standard technique to create sympathy with the villain, as Benjamin Poore points out (29), is to present him in contrast with a considerably ‘worse’ villain� In Royal Flash, this is achieved by a representation of Germans, in particular Prussians, that has marked Nazi undertones� Rather than emphasizing British patriotic fervour - which tends to be a standard element of nineteenth-century imperialist adventure fiction - it is the German villains that are invested with (excessive) rhetoric about the greatness of the ‘fatherland’. Especially Otto von Bismarck has a clearly inflated sense of his own importance: “God has sent you to Germany, and I send you now to Strackenz [where] you will play such a game as has never been played before in the history of the world� […] What a destiny! To be one of the architects of the new Fatherland! ” (RF 143)� Allied occupational forces after 14 For a more detailed overview of this trend, see Poore 10-12� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 315 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 the end of WWII sought to repress the ‘Prussian spirit’ in Germany as one of the elements that had smoothed the road to national socialism� In the realm of fiction, Piers Paul Read’s novel The Junkers (1968) had stressed the connections between Prussian aristocracy and Nazi politics, two years before the publication of Royal Flash (Stevenson 416-417)� Replacing the clearly marked racial other of the imperial adventure novel with the ‘wicked Nazi’ was a general trend in adventure fiction in the second half of the twentieth century where the jungle or desert setting was often replaced with German-occupied countries or the Alpine castle - for which Jutonberg castle in Royal Flash offers an equivalent: “colonial adventure found itself subsumed into this larger field of heroic, national memory, which continued to resonate at the heart of the post-imperial British imaginary well into the 1980s” (Dawson 229)� Flashman’s parody of Germans attacks the aristocracy, with the self-important Bismarck and his uncivilized henchmen� It also ridicules the lower orders, stereotyping them as dull and under the spell of authority, like the amazingly pathetic German mob (“Let anyone stand up to ’em and they shuffle and look at each other and touch their forelocks to him” (RF 278)) or the romantically deluded ensign Wessel (recalling Horst Wessel) who unquestioningly follows the orders Flashman, as prince, gives him to leave his post as guard of the crown jewels to defend the supposedly endangered duchess: “He was one of those very young, intense creatures […] He’d cut the whole bloody German army to bits before he let anyone near Irma� Likewise, and more important, he didn’t doubt his prince for a minute� Ah, the ideals of youth” (RF 263)� The characterisation of Germans as either power-hungry, brutal, and unsophisticated or stupidly subservient easily resonated with post-war British stereotypes about Germany� The notable exception is the extremely clever and charismatic Rudi von Starnberg, who shares the first name with Rudolf Rassendyll but is the worst villain of all� Rudi is not German, as it turns out, but “Austrian, actually” (RF 98)� This, of course, might well be taken as another Nazi joke, for Hitler was also Austrian� Conclusion Fraser’s Royal Flash has been described as a “magnificent send-up” (Higdon 93) of Hope’s adventure tale The Prisoner of Zenda� But it is more than that� On the surface, it parodies the adventure hero as well as the associated ideals of duty, honesty, chivalry, and courage� Fraser presents his protagonist as the opposite of all these ideals, who nonetheless manages to dupe his environment into believing him to be a hero� Especially when read against The Prisoner of Zenda, this highlights the importance of narrative to create meaning 316 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 out of the initially uncoded raw materials offered by events� The presentation of Flashman as villain also pleasantly confirms judgements that have been passed on the Victorians, in particular their racist, sexist, and imperialist attitudes� At the same time, Flashman also feeds into a postmodern pleasure in transgressing established moral codes as a form of (sophisticated) revolt against authority� While we might well disapprove of Flashman the character, the average reader with liberal inclinations is likely to share many of his assessments, like the condemnation of war politics, the sneer against the upper classes, or his resistance to proto-Nazi rhetoric. Significantly, the revulsion from his character is counteracted by the lure of the adventure plot which presents Flashman, though himself a villain, in a suspense-filled struggle with a worse villain, which encourages readers to root for him despite his despicable character. In fact, Fraser improves some of the more obvious deficiencies of Hope’s plotting and thus adds some dramatic moments: For instance, while Hope spends much time and effort to establish the horrors of the pipe descending into the lake in the prisoner’s cell, it plays no part during the liberation of the king� Fraser, on the other hand, employs the pipe in a climactic moment, when Flashman accidentally slides down this pipe after he has all but managed to evade the ferocious Rudi von Starnberg� The attractions of the adventure plot are further assisted by the humour of the narrative� As Marie-Luise Kohlke has observed, Flashman’s bluff and sardonic attitude hides some of the atrocities he either commits or at least condones and lures readers into condoning these crimes with him: “Humour, like aesthetic beauty, can become a distraction from the full horrors of history� It risks disabling an ethico-critical confrontation with the past and its traumatic legacies and vitiating retrospective witness-bearing to historical suffering” (“Killing Humour” 72)� Flashman might be despicable and wicked - though others are clearly worse, and at least Flashman is funny, while the Germans are deadly dull� Flashman offers all the attractions of inventive vice (as opposed to Rudolf Rassendyll’s rather predictable virtue)� The villain, as Benjamin Poore has remarked, offers a Dionysian element “both in the character’s frequent theatricality […] and in his shape-shifting and deception” (22) which makes his adventures less predictable than those of the chivalrous hero� Even Flashman’s cynicism is calculated to arouse admiration or at least tolerance, as we admire rather wittily expressed views that are widely shared in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Our potential alignment with a character who is clearly despicable but whose victory over perils we nonetheless follow with pleasure has some troubling implications - we seem to be closer to the Victorians than we thought� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 317 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Works Cited Bargainnier, Earl F� “The Flashman Papers: Picaresque and Satiric Pastiche�” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol� 18, no� 2, 1976, pp� 109-119� Carroll, Samantha J� “Putting the ‘Neo’ Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction�” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol� 3, no� 2, 2010, pp� 172-205� Crofts, Matthew� “Flashman and the Art of Fictional Autobiography�” Peer English, vol� 10, no� 3, 2015, pp� 26-36� Daly, Nicholas� Ruritania: A Cultural History from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2020� Dawson, Graham� Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities� London: Routledge, 1994� Esser, Helena� “Doppelgängers and Impostors� Flashman’s Neo-Victorian Adventures in Zenda�” Victorian Popular Fictions, vol� 2, no� 1, 2020, pp� 82-97� Fraser, George MacDonald� Flashman� 1969� London: HarperCollins, 1999� ---� Royal Flash� 1970� London: HarperCollins, 1999� ---� Flashman at the Charge� 1973� London: HarperCollins, 2006� ---� Flashman in the Great Game� 1975� London: HarperCollins, 2015� ---� Flashman’s Lady� 1977� London: HarperCollins, 2005� ---� Flashman and the Dragon� 1985� London: HarperCollins, 2015� ---� “How did I Get the Idea of Flashman? ” Flashman and the Dragon� 1985� London: Harper- Collins, 2015, pp� v-xiii� ---� Flashman and the Mountain of Light� 1990� London: HarperCollins, 2015� Girouard, Mark� The Return of Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman� New Haven: Yale UP , 1981� Green, Martin� Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire� New York: Basic Books, 1979� Higdon, David Leon� Shadows of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction� London: Macmillan, 1984� Hope, Anthony� The Prisoner of Zenda� 1894� London: Penguin, 1994� Hughes, Thomas� Tom Brown’s Schooldays� 1856� London: Penguin, 1994� Jones, Max� “‘National Hero and Very Queer Fish’: Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918-72�” Twentieth-Century British History, vol� 26, no� 2, 2015, pp� 175-202� Kestner, Joseph A� Masculinities in British Fiction, 1880-1915� Farnham: Ashgate, 2010� Klotz, Volker� Abenteuer-Romane: Sue, Dumas, Ferry, Retcliffe, May, Verne� Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979� Kohlke, Marie-Luise� “Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction�” Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza� Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp� 53-77� ---� “Neo-Victorian Killing Humour�” Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben� Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp� 71-102� 318 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben� Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century� Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012� Poore, Benjamin� “The Villain-Effect: Distance and Ubiquity in Neo-Victorian Popular Culture�” Neo-Victorian Villains: Adaptations and Transformations in Popular Culture, edited by Benjamin Poore� Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp� 1-48� Steinbrink, Bernd� Abenteuerliteratur des 19. 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