Kipling the Trickster
eBook - PDF

Kipling the Trickster

Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling's Short Stories

  1. 282 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Kipling the Trickster

Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling's Short Stories

About this book

This book is an exploration of the way in which the characters in Rudyard Kipling's short stories use superior knowledge, which often involves deception and the playing of practical jokes. There was early critical hostility to the stance adopted by Kipling's characters, that of a superior knowledge acquired by friendship with a small male circle. This book engages with a long-standing critical tradition which treats the jokes as acts of vicarious revenge or symptoms of supposed defects in Kipling's personality, instead setting his use of the practical joke in the wider social context of his time.

In this book Kipling's writing is examined for what it reveals about a complex, self-conscious but powerful range of values rather than what it is supposed to disguise or conceal. Although he endorsed British colonial rule, Kipling was frank about the slackness, endemic rule-breaking and second-rate nature of British rule in India. He also criticised some of the widespread cultural, religious and moral phenomena of his time, which he thought harmful. Many of his short stories contain an implied but serious criticism of Victorian beliefs, from attitudes to death-beds, and schoolboys to Positivism.

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Yes, you can access Kipling the Trickster by John Coates in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & British History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Peter Lang Group
Year
2021
Print ISBN
9781800793415
eBook ISBN
9781800793422
Edition
1
Topic
History
Subtopic
British History
Index
History

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Table of contents
  3. Foreword
  4. Introduction: Knowingness, Practical Jokes and the Use of Superior Knowledge in Kipling’s Short Stories
  5. Chapter 1: Approaches to Kipling’s Comic Writing
  6. Chapter 2: Kipling and Practical Jokes
  7. Chapter 3: ‘The God from the Machine’
  8. Chapter 4: ‘Private Learoyd’s Story’
  9. Chapter 5: ‘Thrown Away’
  10. Chapter 6: ‘A Bank Fraud’
  11. Chapter 7: ‘Lispeth’
  12. Chapter 8: ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’
  13. Chapter 9: ‘Watches of the Night’
  14. Chapter 10: ‘Three and – an Extra’
  15. Chapter 11: ‘My Sunday at Home’
  16. Chapter 12: The Imminent Peril and Narrow Escape of the Knowing Narrator
  17. Chapter 13: The Knowing Narrator: ‘On the City Wall’
  18. Chapter 14: ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’
  19. Chapter 15: ‘Dayspring Mishandled’
  20. Bibliography
  21. Index