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In Time's Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling by
Challenging received opinion and breaking new ground in Kipling scholarship, these essays on Kipling's attitudes to the First World War, to the culture of Edwardian England, to homosexuality and to Jewishness, bring historical, literary critical and postcolonial approaches to this perennially controversial writer.The Introduction situates the book in the context of Kipling's changing reputation and of recent Kipling scholarship. After the perspectives of Chesterton (1905), Orwell (1942) and Jarrell (1960), newer contributions address Kipling's approach to the Boer war, his involvement with World War One, his Englishness and the politics of literary quotation. Different aspects of Kipling's relation to India are explored, including the 'Mutiny', Eastern religions, his Indian travel writings and his knowledge of 'the vernacular'. This collection, whose contributors include Hugh Brogan, Dan Jacobson, Daniel Karlin and Bryan Cheyette, is essential reading for academics and students of Kipling, Victorian and Edwardian English literature and cultural history.
Kim by
The orphan Kim, whose father was an Irish soldier, makes his living by begging on the streets of Lahore and running errands. An aged Tibetan Lama is on a journey to find the mythical "River of the Arrow" and in doing so free himself from the Wheel of Things. Becoming his disciple, Kim joins the Lama to travel along the Grand Trunk Road. But Kim also gets himself involved in the Great Game, Russia and Britain's political conflict in Central Asia, and is given a task by the British - to carry a message to Umballa's British commander.
Kim by
Kim, one of Kipling's masterpieces, is the story of Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an officer in the Irish Regiment who spends his childhood as a vagabond in Lahore. The book is a carefully organized, powerful evocation of place and of a young man's quest for identity.
Kipling by
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was the greatest writer in a Britain that ruled the largest empire the world has known, yet he was always a controversial figure, as deeply hated as he was loved. This accessible biography aims at an understanding of the man behind the image and gives an explanation of his enduring popularity
Kipling's Art of Fiction 1884-1901 by
Kipling's Art of Fiction 1884-1901 re-establishes its subject as a major artist. Through extended close readings of individual works, and unprecedentedly detailed attention to changes in location and readership, it distinguishes between two kinds of Kipling fiction. The first is coercive and concerned with the authoritarian control of meaning; the second relates less directly to its immediate historical surroundings and is more aesthetically complex.Misunderstandings have often resulted from confusing the two kinds of work. Distinguishing between them allows for a newly coherent account of Kipling's career, both explaining his artistic achievement and making clearer his identity as a political writer. Changes in Kipling's narrative practice are tracked as hemoves from India to Britain and the US, and engages with a succession of new audiences and political contexts; detailed readings are provided of such key texts as Plain Tales from the Hills, The Jungle Books and Kim. As well as revealing the precise nature of Kipling's artistry, this book shows how properties of narrative which have been generally underrated -- such as embodiment and externality -- can be used to make sophisticated fictions, and by linking these toRobert Louis Stevenson's discussion of the romance, suggests new ways in which such work might be approached.
Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction by 
Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature by
Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure "haram" flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child-agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing? In Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Ambreen Hai argues that these writers focus self-reflectively on the unstable capacity of words to have material effects and to be censored, and that this central concern with literary agency is embedded in, indeed definitive of, colonial and postcolonial literature.Making Words Matter contends that the figure of the human body is central to the self-imagining of the text in the world because the body uniquely concretizes three dimensions of agency: it is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection. Hai's work exemplifies a new trend in postcolonial studies: to combine aesthetics and politics and to offer a historically and theoretically informed mode of interpretation that is sophisticated, lucid, and accessible.This is the first study to identify and examine the rich convergence of issues and to chart their dynamic. Hai opens up the field of postcolonial literary studies to fresh questions, engaging knowledgeably with earlier scholarship and drawing on interdisciplinary theory to read both well known and lesser-known texts in a new light. It should be of interest internationally to students and scholars in a variety of fields including British, Victorian, modernist, colonial, or postcolonial literary studies, queer or cultural studies, South Asian studies, history, and anthropology.
Rudyard Kipling by
-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
Rudyard Kipling by
Rudyard Kipling was a Victorian and an early modernist, a disciplinarian imperialist who sympathised with children and outlaws, a globe-trotter who mythologised "Old England", and a world-famous author whom intellectuals despised. The central theme of this book is the way his work and itsreception are both fissured and energised by these contradictions. This thorough study initially discusses Kipling's ambivalent knowing attitude to unknowable otherness, his rhetorical imitations of Indian and demotic vernaculars, his work ethic and ideal of imperialist masculinity, thuscontextualising the central discussion of his masterpiece Kim which, almost uniquely, takes Indian otherness as a source of pleasure not anxiety. Jan Montefiore describes Kipling as a writer on the cusp of modernity, examining how his fiction and poetry engaged with radio, cinema and air travel, howhis poetry anticipated and influenced the subversive uncertainties of modernism, and how his post-war contributions to the literature
Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism by
VictorianStudies on theWebCritics Choice Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism is an exploration of two fundamental yet greatly neglected aspects of the author's life and writings: his deep-seated pessimism and his complex creed of heroism. The method of the book is both biographical and critical. Biographically, it traces the roots of Kipling's dark worldview and his search for something to believe in, a way of thinking and acting in defiance of life's hellishness. There matters were more basic to him than any of his social or political opinions, but this the first full-length study devoted to them. Critically, the book takes a fresh and close look at some of Kipling's most important works. The result challenges long established assumptions and amounts to a major reconsideration of novels like Kim and stories like "Mary Postgate" and "The Gardener." Central in these discussions of individual writings is Kipling's concern with the heroic life, but of equal importance is the analysis and evaluation of them as works of art. Avoiding the tangled and special language of some recent literary theory, this will appeal to a wide audience of those interested in Kipling's mind and art.
Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Rider Haggard on Screen, Stage, Radio and Television by
Rudyard Kipling and Sir Henry Rider Haggard--close friends--wrote about adventure and the exotic in very different ways. Examined together, their works illuminate each other. The writings of both have been adapted to the screen, stage, television, and radio numerous times (with varying degrees of fidelity) and this is a complete guide to those adaptations. In the main section of the book each original literary work is summarized, followed by a complete filmography and an analysis of each film based on that story or poem. Additional sections provide information on adaptations for radio, stage, and television. Photographs are included from films ranging from The Jungle Book (Kipling) to King Solomon's Mines (Haggard).
White Skins/Black Masks by
In this exciting re-reading of the classic work of Haggard and Kipling, Gail Ching-Liang Low examines the representational dynamics of colonizer versus colonized. Exploring the interface between the native 'other' as a reflection and as a point of address, the author asserts that this 'other' is a mirror reflecting the image of the colonizer - a 'cultural cross-dressing'. Employing psychoanalysis, anthropology and postcolonial theory, Low analyzes the way in which fantasy and fabulation are caught up in networks of desire and power. White Skins/Black Masks is a fascinating entry into the current debate of post-colonial theory.