Conservative Belief And The Imagination In Kipling S Fiction

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.

"These 29 essays on fantasy, skepticism, writing, and related topics--spanning nearly two decades--are filled with the insightful observations of a literary master. Schweitzer is one of the best critics in the field."--John Gregory Betancourt. (Criticism)

The Anglo-Saxon world continues to be a source of fascination in modern culture. Its manifestations in a variety of media are here examined.

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.