This is a study of the forces and influences that shaped Kipling's work, including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of empire and the deaths of two of his children, and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him.

Autorentext

PHILLIP MALLETT is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. His work on Kipling includes an edition of Limits and Renewals, as well as an edited collection of essays, Kipling Considered. He has also edited three collections of essays on Hardy, including Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, in 2002.

Zusammenfassung
Rudyard Kipling made his name as the poet and story-teller of the British in India, but his stories (over 300) include tales for children, studies of love and hate, of healing and revenge, of the Sussex countryside and of the supernatural. His poems, including 'If' and the Barrack-Room Ballads, are among the best known and most quoted in the language. He was a newspaperman by training and instinct, and a gifted travel writer. He was too an intensely political man, a friend of Cecil Rhodes, one of the fiercest opponents of Irish Home Rule, a speechwriter for King George V, and cousin to Stanley Baldwin. This fascinating book traces Kipling's difficult private life, his dealings with the literary and political world of his time, the rise and fall of his reputation, and his right to be considered the greatest English writer of the short story.

Inhalt

Preface Childhood and Youth Seven Years' Hard: Kipling in India The Conquest of London Citizens of America The Song of the English Kim In a Hidden Kingdom Towards Armageddon The Great War and After The Last Decade Bibliography Index