Abstract
Postcolonial Studies and Kipling have a curious symbiotic relationship. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the foundational text in the field, renewed interest in Kipling as a representative Orientalist, who not only gave ‘imaginative perspectives’ to scholarly Orientalism, but also gave literary expression to ‘the White Man’, ‘an idea, a persona, a style of being’, which made it possible for the West to construct and take hold of the Orient (Said, 1995: 224, 226–7). This study was followed by the timely expiration of Kipling’s copyright in 1987, which led to the reprint of his major works as paperbacks, notably by Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics. Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ appeared in 1986. This attempt to re-evaluate Said’s framework through the reading of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian writing refers to Kipling as being placed at the centre of postcolonial debates (see, for instance, Williams, 1989). At the same time, Kipling became a key to understanding postcolonial literature, as many texts implicitly or explicitly engage with, and attempt to rewrite, Kipling.1 Thus Kipling, whose popularity declined with the demise of the British Empire, was resurrected as a canonical author in Postcolonial Studies. His work became a fertile ground for postcolonial scholars to test new theories.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Work Cited
Auden, W. H. (2002 [1943]) ‘The Poet of the Encirclement,’ The New Republic, 24 October, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume II, 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 198–203.
Barghouti, Mourid (2004) I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Souief. London: Bloomsbury.
Behad, Ali (2006) ‘On Globalization, Again,’ in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 62–79.
Bhaba, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Boehmer, Elleke (2004) ‘Global and Textual Webs in an Age of Transnational Capitalism; or, What isn't New about Empire,’ Postcolonial Studies 7(1): 11–26.
Brantlinger, Patrick (2007) ‘Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and Its Afterlives,’ English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 50(2): 172–91.
Cronin, Richard (1987) ‘The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children’, Modem Fiction Studies 33(2): 201–13.
Gilroy, Paul (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Oxford: Routledge.
Grant, Ben (2009) Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire. New York: Routledge.
Hamid, Mohsin (2007) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin Books.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. (1985) ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: the Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,’ Critical Inquiry 12(1): 59–87.
Jarrell, Randall (1965) ‘On Preparing to Read Kipling,’ in Kipling and the Critics, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. London: Peter Owen, pp. 133–49.
Kipling, Rudyard (1941) A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, selected by T. S. Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling. London: Faber and Faber.
McBratney, John (2002) Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Bom. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Mohanty, Satya P. (1991) ‘Drawing the Color Line: Kipling and the Culture of Colonial Rule,’ in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 311–43.
Montefiore, Jan (2007) Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1986) Kipling and ‘Orientalism.’ London & Sydney: Croom Helm.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1996) ’“The Bhabhal of Tongues”: Reading Kipling, Reading Bhabha,’ in Writing India, 1757–1990, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 111–38.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart (2002) ‘“I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim”: Kipling and Postcolonialism,’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37: 39–58.
Mufti, Aamir (1998) ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism and the Question of Minority Culture,’ Critical Inquiry 25(1): 95–125.
Mufti, Aamir (2007) Enlightenment in the Colony: the Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Pamuk, Orhan (2005) Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber.
Plotz, Judith (2004) ‘Whose is Kim? Postcolonial India Rewrites Kipling’s Imperial Boy,’ South Asian Review 25(2): 3–22.
Randall, Don (1998) ‘The Kipling Given, Ondaatje’s Take: Reading Kim through The English Patient,’ Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 5(2): 131–44.
Randall, Don (2000) Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Robinson, Francis (2009) ‘Crisis of Authority: Crisis of Islam?’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Cambridge University Press) Third Series, 19: 339–54.
Said, Edward W. ([1978] 1995) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Said, Edward W. (1987) ‘Introduction’ to Rudyard Kipling, Kim. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 7–46. Reprinted with revision in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, pp. 159–96.
Sepamla, Sipho (1989) ‘If,’ in The Penguin Book of Southern African Verse, ed. Stephen Gray. London: Penguin Books, pp. 286–7.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2002) ‘Resident Alien,’ in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 47–65.
Suleri, Sara (1992) The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, Patrick (1989) ‘Kim and Orientalism,’ in Kipling Considered, ed. Phillip Mallett. London: Macmillan, pp. 33–55.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2010 Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rooney, C., Nagai, K. (2010). Introduction. In: Rooney, C., Nagai, K. (eds) Kipling and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290471_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290471_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-30949-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-29047-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)