Kipling's Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity

by D. Randall

Overview

Kipling's Imperial Boy opens by examining the significance of boyhood in the evolution of European modernity. Chapter one 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 Rudyard Kipling's fiction of the imperial boy, emphasizing the imaginative link between adolescence and cultural hybridity and offering detailed readings of The Jungle Book, Stalky & Co ., and Kim.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349414215
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/2000
Edition description:	1st ed. 2000
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

DON RANDALL is Assistant Professor of English at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He has published several articles in scholarly journals, including Texas Studies in Literature and Language and Novel.

Table of Contents

Introduction The Genealogy of the Imperial Boy The Jungle Books : Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire Stalky & Co.: Resituating the Empire and the Imperial Boy Kim : Disciplinary Power and Cultural Hybridity Kim : Ethnography and the Hybrid Boy Conclusion Endnotes Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

'Don Randall's 'Kipling's Imperial Boy' is an important contribution to

Kipling studies and to the area of colonial discourse analysis more

generally. Historically sensitive and theoretically aware, it provides a

persuasive and original mapping of theories of cultural hybridity onto

discourses of adolescence - and vice versa. In a series of close readings

of 'The Jungle Books', 'Stalky and Co' and 'Kim', Randall ably

demonstrates that Kipling's imperial boys are liminal figures who both

subvert and reinforce the borders between cultures and who both counter

and confirm the masculinism of colonial epistemology. 'Kipling's Imperial

Boy' is further evidence of the continuing recuperation of Kipling as a

complex and important artist and thinker.' - Bart Moore Gilbert, University of London

'...a very impressive piece of work.' - Laurence Kitzan, Victorian Studies

From the Publisher