Overview

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.

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9783031402197

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Reviews

“Paffard is a keen and meticulous reader of Kipling. ... He has made me want to revisit and reappraise several stories, which is surely a mark of his success. ... It is an expensive book, but a valuable and significant one: insightful, engaging and challengingly written, well researched and referenced, and with a workable index. … For this he deserves congratulation, and a wide readership.” (Kipling Journal, Issue 398, May, 2024)

Author Information

Mark Paffard is an independent scholar. He is the author of Kipling""s Indian Fiction (1989) and several articles in The Kipling Journal.

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