Narratives of Empire
The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling

A reading of Kipling's fiction about himself and India that links experience with narrative strategy and ideology.

Zohreh T. Sullivan (Author)

9780521434256, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 April 1993

216 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.49 kg

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.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1. Kipling's India
2. Something of himself
3. The problem of otherness: a hundred sorrows
4. The worst muckers
5. The bridge builders
6. Kim: empire of the beloved
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]