Kipling's Imperial Boy
Subtitle: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; Palgrave
Published: January 6, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780333761045
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: 19th century; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; British Isles; Europe; Kipling, Rudyard; Literary Criticism & Collections / European; Views on imperialism; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; European - General; 1865-1936; Boys; Characters; History and criticism; Imperialism in literature; Kipling, Rudyard,; Multiculturalism in literature; Political fiction, English
Description: "Kipling's Imperial Boy opens by examining the significance of boyhood in the evolution of European modernity. Chapter 1 shows how closely the figure of the adolescent (the boy) is associated with questions of imperial expansion and consolidation. The chapters that follow take up Kipling's fictions of the imperial boy, emphasizing the imaginative link between adolescence and cultural hybridity and offering detailed readings of The Jungle Book, Stalky and Co., and Kim. Chapter 2 considers Mowgli as the organizing figure in an allegorical treatment of British imperial history in India.

Chapter 3, on Stalky and Co., shows how Kipling's school stories disrupt the conception of an insular English culture, by opening the imperial 'centre' to the influences of the colonial 'periphery'. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the hybrid Kim's role in Kipling's envisioning of British India, first in relation to imperial administration and intelligence, then in relation to ethnography."--Jacket.