Kipling's Imperial Boy

by Don Randall

"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.