Overview
- Examines the entirety of Kipling's fictional oeuvre
- Explores the process of literary production in Kipling's work, providing insight into its literary appeal
- Offers a complex reading of Kipling's fiction, and the tension at play between his conservatism and imagination
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About this book
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.
Keywords
Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Conservative Belief and the Imagination in Kipling’s Fiction
Authors: Mark Paffard
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40220-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-40219-7Published: 11 October 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-40222-7Due: 10 November 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-40220-3Published: 09 October 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 221
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, European Literature