Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling

by Zohreh T. Sullivan

• ISBN13: 9780521063135
• ISBN10: 0521063132
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Writers whose work reflects the experience of empire betray the anxieties and contradictions at the heart of the imperial enterprise. Zohreh T. Sullivan's reading of Rudyard Kipling's writings about India expands our sense of colonial discourse and recovers the cultural context and recurring tropes in his early journalism and fiction, in Kim, and in his late autobiography. She charts the fragmentation of Kipling's position as child, as colonizer and as 'poet of empire', finding in his representation of childhood's loss the site of repressed and disavowed desires and fears that resurface in later work. In using Kipling's troubled intimacy with empire as the link between history and narrative, Sullivan sees in Kipling's ambivalence his negotiation between the desire for union with his golden 'best-beloved' India and the historic imperatives of separation from it.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Kipling's India

Something of himself

The problem of otherness: a hundred sorrows

The worst muckers

The bridge builders

Kim: empire of the beloved

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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