Narratives of Empire by Zohreh T. Sullivan - 9780521434256

Narratives of EmpireThe Fictions of Rudyard Kipling\nAuthor(s): Zohreh T. Sullivan\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521434256, 978-0521434256\nSynopsis\nWriters whose work reflects the experience of empire betray the anxieties and contradictions at the heart of the imperial enterprise. Zohreh T. Sullivan's reading of Rudyard Kipling's writings about India expands our sense of colonial discourse and recovers the cultural context and recurring tropes in his early journalism and fiction, in Kim, and in his late autobiography. She charts the fragmentation of Kipling's position as child, as colonizer and as 'poet of empire', finding in his representation of childhood's loss the site of repressed and disavowed desires and fears that resurface in later work. In using Kipling's troubled intimacy with empire as the link between history and narrative, Sullivan sees in Kipling's ambivalence his negotiatio.