Kipling's Art of Fiction 1884-1901


Book Description

David Sergeant grew up in west Cornwall and studied English at Oxford, where he is now a Junior Research Fellow. He is a published poet and has also written on Robert Burns and Ted Hughes.




Conservative Belief and the Imagination in Kipling’s Fiction


Book Description

This book explores the tension between the conservatism and the imaginative process across the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s fiction. It shows how Kipling the conservative thinker explores problematic aspects of Empire and the English class-system, both because it is unavoidable and because his art requires it. This tension is evident in the Indian and ‘Imperial’ Kipling and in his later ‘English’ stories. Situating Kipling’s fiction within changing social and political contexts, Mark Paffard shows the anxieties Kipling as a conservative responds to in the early Indian stories to be very different from those caused by the economic and technological upheaval of the ‘Belle Epoque’, and those arising from the First World War. Paffard reveals how Kipling’s development as a writer is shaped by his need to respond differently to a changing world: imperialist ideology and conservatism dictate the stories that he sets out to write, and his imagination and sympathy shape the stories that are finally written.




Meeting Without Knowing it


Book Description

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, with heroism, with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the "mythopoeic" impulse in fin de siecle culture. Meeting Without Knowing It dentifies these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, before charting them against intersections in their lives. Kipling and Yeats were, for much of their careers, irreconcilable political enemies. However, a cross-reading of the two poets' bardic ambitions, heroic tropes, and interpretations of history reveals that, to achieve their opposed political ends, they frequently partook of a common discourse. Supplementing this analysis with biographical context, we can trace these shared concerns to their late nineteenth century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles that they inhabited in fin de siecle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancor to their ideological division after the Boer War. In turn, acrimony and denunciation only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.




Ethnographic Narratives as World Literature


Book Description

This book links world-literary studies with anthropology and ethnography. It shows how ethnographic narratives can represent a compelling point of departure for world-literary explorations. The volume compares the travel writing and fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling as colonial ethnographic narratives; the militant writings of Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi; and the travelogues and ethnographic fiction of Amitav Ghosh and the literary journalism of Frank Westerman. Each of these readings focuses on a set of social, political and historical circumstances and relies on a dialogue with anthropological theory and history. This book demonstrates how imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and ecology are interdependent, and contributes to methodological debates within both anthropology and world-literary studies.




Flora Annie Steel


Book Description

A collection of essays on the writer who “after Rudyard Kipling . . . was the most famous nineteenth-century British author to depict India” (Nineteenth-Century Literature). Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) was a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling and rivaled his popularity as a writer during her lifetime, but her legacy faded due to gender-biased politics. She spent twenty-two years in India, mainly in the Punjab. This collection is the first to focus entirely on this “unconventional memsahib” and her contribution to turn-of-the-century Anglo-Indian literature. The eight essays draw attention to Steel’s multifaceted work—ranging from fiction to journalism to letter writing, from housekeeping manuals to philanthropic activities. These essays, by recognized experts on her life and work, will appeal to interdisciplinary scholars and readers in the fields of British India and Women’s Studies. Contributors: Amrita Banerjee, Helen Pike Bauer, Ralph Crane, Gráinne Goodwin, Alan Johnson, Anna Johnston, Danielle Nielsen, LeeAnne M. Richardson, Susmita Roye “Going beyond Steel’s most famous and widely discussed work, On the Face of the Waters, this excellent volume strives to shed light on her less well-known novels, such as The Potter’s Thumb and Voices in the Night: A Chromatic Fantasia, as well as her short fiction and other genres of her writing that have not received much attention from literary critics, including housekeeping advice, journalism, and letters to editors.” —Oxford University Press Journals “The essays in this volume treat topics ranging from Steel’s rewriting of women’s role in the maintenance of British power to her sympathetic representation of the wit and creativity of Indian girls.” —Studies in English Literature 1500-1900




Kipling in India


Book Description

This book explores and re-evaluates Kipling’s connection with India, its people, culture, languages, and locales through his experiences and his writings. Kipling’s works attracted interest among a large section of the British public, stimulating curiosity in their far-off Indian Empire, and made many canonize him as an emblem of the ‘Raj’. This volume highlights the astonishing social and thematic range of his Indian writings as represented in The Jungle Books; Kim; his early verse; his Simla-based tales of Anglo-Indian intrigues and love affairs; his stories of the common Indian people; and his journalism. It brings together different theoretical and contextual readings of Kipling to examine how his experience of India influenced his creative work and conversely how his imperial loyalties conditioned his creative engagement with India. The 18 chapters here engage with the complexities and contradictions in his writings and analyse the historical and political contexts in which he wrote them, and the contexts in which we read him now. With well-known contributors from different parts of the world – including India, the UK, the USA, Canada, France, Japan, and New Zealand – this book will be of great interest not only to those interested in Kipling’s life and works but also to researchers and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, comparative studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, colonial history, and cultural studies.




Novel Cultivations


Book Description

Shortlisted for the Best Book Prize from the British Society of Literature and Science Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species—botanical and human—to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories. Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire, Novel Cultivations recognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve—often more so than people—as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels. Elizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, to Algernon Blackwood’s hair-raising "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.




Megasthenes' Indica


Book Description

This book provides a new translation of all the surviving portions of the description of India written by Megasthenes in about 310 BCE, the fullest account of Indian geography, history and customs available to the classical world. The Indica was a pioneering work of ethnography that exemplified a new direction in Hellenistic writing; India was little-known to the Greeks before the expedition of Alexander the Great in 326–325 BCE, and Megasthenes, who resided as an ambassador in the Maurya capital Pataliputra for some time, provided the classical world with most of what it knew about India. Megasthenes’ book, which became a classic in antiquity, now survives only in fragments preserved in other Greek and Latin authors. Stoneman’s work offers a reliable and accessible version of all the writings that can plausibly be ascribed to Megasthenes. His subject ranges from detailed accounts of social structure and the royal household, to descriptions of elephant hunting and Indian philosophical ideas. His book is the only written source contemporary with the Maurya kingdom of Candragupta, since writing was not in use in India at this date. This translation provides a path to clearer understanding of Greek ethnography and a valuable resource on Indian history. The book will be of value not only to classical scholars with an interest in Hellenistic history and cultural attitudes, and to their students, but also to scholars working on the early history of India, who have had to rely (unless they are also Greek scholars) on scattered and dated collections of evidence.




The Greek Experience of India


Book Description

An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCE. When the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander's army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world. They knew a few legends and travelers' tales, but their categories of thought were inadequate to encompass what they witnessed. The plants were unrecognizable, their properties unknown. The customs of the people were various and puzzling. While Alexander's conquest was brief, ending with his death in 323 BCE, the Greeks would settle in the Indian region for the next two centuries, forging an era of productive interactions between the two cultures. The Greek Experience of India explores the various ways that the Greeks reacted to and constructed life in India during this fruitful period. From observations about botany and mythology to social customs, Richard Stoneman examines the surviving evidence of those who traveled to India. Most particularly, he offers a full and valuable look at Megasthenes, ambassador of the Seleucid king Seleucus to Chandragupta Maurya, and provides a detailed discussion of Megasthenes's now-fragmentary book Indica. Stoneman considers the art, literature, and philosophy of the Indo-Greek kingdom and how cultural influences crossed in both directions, with the Greeks introducing their writing, coinage, and sculptural and architectural forms, while Greek craftsmen learned to work with new materials such as ivory and stucco and to probe the ideas of Buddhists and other ascetics.