Visar resultat för..."Kiplings"

'The best criticism renews our interest in an author, and that is what Mr Eliot has done in his remarkable essay which prefaces his own selection from Kipling's verse . . . a mature essay full of insight . . . Mr Eliot's essay is an admirable example of the finest type of criticism. He succeeds in making us look at his subject's work with freshly opened eyes and he is at once sober, illuminating and sound.' Spectator

Kipling's Art of Fiction 1884-1901 re-establishes its subject as a major artist. Through extended close readings of individual works, and unprecedentedly detailed attention to changes in location and readership, it distinguishes between two kinds of Kipling fiction. The first is coercive and concerned with the authoritarian control of meaning; the second relates less directly to its immediate historical surroundings and is more aesthetically complex. Misunderstandings have often resulted from confusing the two kinds of work. Distinguishing between them allows for a newly coherent account of Kipling's career, both explaining his artistic achievement and making clearer his identity as a political writer. Changes in Kipling's narrative practice are tracked as he moves from India to Britain and the US, and engages with a succession of new audiences and political contexts; detailed readings are provided of such key texts as Plain Tales from the Hills, The Jungle Books and Kim. As well as revealing the precise nature of Kipling's artistry, this book shows how properties of narrative which have been generally underrated -- such as embodiment and externality -- can be used to make sophisticated fictions, and by linking these to Robert Louis Stevenson's discussion of the romance, suggests new ways in which such work might be approached.

This is an upstairs-downstairs view of the Victorian-Edwardian army, one of the world's most peculiar fighting forces. The battles it fought are household words, but the idiosyncracies and eccentricities of its soldiers and the often appalling conditions under which they lived have gone largely unrecorded. Byron Farwell explores here the lives of officers and men, their foibles, gallantry, and diversions, their discipline and their rewards.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian CultureSeries edited by Julian WolfreysDrawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century’s literature and cultureRudyard Kipling's Fiction: Mapping Psychic SpacesLizzy Welby Reads Kipling’s fiction through the lens of French feminism to reinstate the abjected maternal feminine in his artThis study provides an entirely new reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. It examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures. In doing so, it peels back the layers of masculine bravado that continues to characterize Kipling’s fiction to reveal a valorized ‘feminine’ space. From readings of the 1888 story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' through The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co., Kim, The Day's Work, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, Lizzy Welby demonstrates that Kipling created ways of rediscovering a symbolised feminine landscape as a restorative space, which was part of his 'psychic mapping'.Key Features:Demonstrates a steady development through Kipling’s long and extensive writing careerProvides insights into the man and his art as well as providing a new way of reading KiplingReferences a considerable range of scholarly and biographical work on Kipling, historical and cultural studies of nineteenth century India Offers close reading of passages from Kipling’s fiction, showing how a feminised landscape is violated by (masculine) technological developmentsDr Lizzy Welby is a creative and critical writer specialising in the works of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. She has published articles and chapters on Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter. In 2012, she was awarded third place at the Bridport Prize for Short Fiction for her story ‘Jugged Hare’. She lives in London and teaches at the College Francais Bilingue de Londres. In 2014 she won first prize in the Lorian Hemingway short story competition for a story entitled ‘The Breakers’ s’.

Despite Kipling's popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its characterization as 'children's literature'. Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between 'children's' and 'adult' literature, and poses important questions about how these strict categories have influenced critical work on Kipling and on literature in general. For example, why are some of Kipling's books viewed as children's literature, and what critical assumptions does this label produce? Why is it that Kim is viewed by critics as transcending attempts at categorization? Using Kipling as a case study, Walsh discusses texts such as Kim, The Jungle Books, the Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, re-evaluating earlier critical approaches and offering fresh readings of these relatively neglected works. In the process, she suggests new directions for postcolonial and childhood studies and interrogates the way biographical criticism on children's literature in particular has tended to supersede and obstruct other kinds of readings.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Kipling among critics who struggle to reconcile the multiple pleasures offered by his fiction with the controversial political ideas that inform it. Peter Havholm takes up the challenge, piecing together Kipling's understanding of empire and humanity from evidence in Anglo-Indian and Indian newspapers of the 1870s and 1880s and offering a new explanation for Kipling's post-1891 turn to fantasy and stories written to be enjoyed by children. By dovetailing detailed contextual knowledge of British India with informed and sensitive close readings of well-known works like 'The Man Who Would Be King',' Kim', 'The Light That Failed', and 'They', Havholm offers a fresh reading of Kipling's early and late stories that acknowledges Kipling's achievement as a writer and illuminates the seductive allure of the imperialist fantasy.