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.

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.

Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. This new selection brings together the best of his short writings, following the development of his work over fifty years. They take us from the harsh, cruel, vividly realized world of the 'Indian' stories that made his name, through the experimental modernism of his middle period to the highly-wrought subtleties of his later pieces. Including the tale of insanity and empire, 'The Man Who Would Be King', the high-spirited 'The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat', the fable of childhood cruelty and revenge 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep', the menacing psychological study 'Mary Postgate' and the ambiguous portrayal of grief and mourning in 'The Gardener', here are stories of criminals, ghosts, femmes fatales, madness and murder.

An overview of Kipling's work, his career and postcolonial views on his often controversial position on imperialism.

David Sergeant grew up in west Cornwall and studied English at Oxford, where he is now a Junior Research Fellow. He is a published poet and has also written on Robert Burns and Ted Hughes.

This Pivot explores the uses of the Mughal past in the historical fiction of colonial India. Through detailed reconsiderations of canonical works by Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Romesh Chunder Dutt, the author argues for a more complex and integral understanding of the part played by the Mughal imaginary in colonial and early Indian nationalist projections of sovereignty. Evoking the rich historical and transnational contexts of these literary narratives, the study demonstrates the ways in which, at successive moments of crisis and contestation in the later Raj, the British Indian state continued to be troubled by its early and profound investments in models of despotism first located by colonial administrators in the figure of the Mughal emperor. At the heart of these political fictions lay the issue of territoriality and the founding problem of a British claim to sole proprietorship of Indian land – a form of Orientalist exceptionalism that at once underpinned and could never fully be integrated with the colonial rule of law. Alongside its recovery of a wealth of popular and often overlooked colonial historiography, The Return of the Mughal emphasises the relevance of theories of political theology – from Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz to Talal Asad and Giorgio Agamben – to our understanding of the fictional and jurisprudential histories of colonialism. This study aims to show just how closely the pageantry and romance of empire in India connects to its early politics of terror and even today continues to inform the figure of the Mughal in the sectarian politics of Hindu Nationalism.

Making use of recent masculinity theories, Joseph A. Kestner sheds new light on Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Canonical authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Olive Schreiner are examined alongside popular writers like A.E.W. Mason, W.H. Hudson, and John Buchan, providing an expansive picture of the crisis of masculinity that pervades adventure texts during the period.