description: This book brings together a representative selection of the best criticism available upon the writings of Rudyard Kipling. The essays are reprinted here in the chronological order of their original publication. I am grateful to Peter Childers for his skill and devotion in helping me edit this volume. My introduction first suggests that Kipling, despite appearances, had a profound affinity to the aesthetic vision and solipsistic nihilism of Walter Pater, and then traces both these qualities and their antitheses in Kim, Kipling's strongest single work. The chronological sequence of criticism begins with Randall Jarrell's overview of Kipling's achievement as a story writer, which is followed here by two loving appreciations of Kim, by the British novelist Angus Wilson and by Irving Howe. Donald Davie, poet and critic, reconsiders Kipling's imperialism as a mode of puritanism, while Zohreh T. Sullivan subtly unveils the sexual anxieties and divided loyalties that help to constitute the literary aspects of that imperialism. In what seems to me a breakthrough into a new mode of Kipling criticism, David Bromwich brings together two of the best stories, "Wireless" and "Dayspring Mishandled," with the best poems and Kim so as to illuminate the daemonic basis of Kipling's art. Elliot L. Gilbert relates the death of Kipling's son in World War I to the poet-novelist's later art and life, both of which invest deeply in a certain metaphoric silence. In this book's final essay, Robert L. Caserio reads The Light That Failed as Kipling's deliberate poetics of failure, and speculates in regard to Kipling's influence upon Conrad. Caserio, like Bromwich and Gilbert, teaches us that there is still a largely unknown and profound writer to be uncovered in Kipling.
language: English
title: Rudyard Kipling — Modern Critical Views
titlecomplete: Rudyard Kipling — Modern Critical Views
ratings_count: 4
series: Bloom's Major Short Story Writers, Bloom's Modern Critical Views
publisher: Chelsea House Publications