Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T01:46:49.427Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF BRITISH INDIA IN RUDYARD KIPLING'S “THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2014

Albert D. Pionke
Albert D. Pionke*
Affiliation:
The University of Alabama
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

First published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888), the fifth volume in A. H. Wheeler & Co.'s “Indian Railway Library” series, “The Man Who Would Be King” may be the best and is almost certainly the last story that Rudyard Kipling wrote while still living in India. It is, then, the culmination of an annus mirabilis that saw its twenty-three-year-old author publish six books, albeit short ones, and achieve widespread fame in India. He also garnered sufficient acclaim in England that he would decide to resign his editorial position at George Allen's two Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer, in favor of a literary life in London. In light of these biographical facts, readers might reasonably expect the story to offer a summative, even authoritative, conclusion about life and empire on the subcontinent that Kipling had represented so abundantly all year.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 3: EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN INDIA , September 2014 , pp. 335 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Arata, Stephen D. “A Universal Foreignness: Kipling in the Fin-de-Siècle.” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 36.1 (1993): 7–38.Google Scholar
Bascom, Tim. “Secret Imperialism: The Reader's Response to the Narrator in ‘The Man Who Would Be King.’” ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 31.2 (1988): 162–73.Google Scholar
Battles, Paul. “‘The Mark of the Beast’: Rudyard Kipling's Apocalyptic Vision of Empire.” Studies in Short Fiction 33.3 (1996): 333–44.Google Scholar
Bayley, C. A. “Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India.” Modern Asian Studies 27.1 (1993): 3–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Bengal Mutiny.” Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine 82 (Sept. 1857): 372–92.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Robert. “The Voice of the ‘Hooligan.’” Contemporary Review 76 (December 1899): 776–89.Google Scholar
Cornell, Louis L.Kipling in India. London: Macmillan, 1966.Google Scholar
Deane, Bradley. “Imperial Barbarians: Primitive Masculinity in Lost World Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008): 205–25.Google Scholar
Draudt, Manfred. “Reality or Delusion? Narrative Technique and Meaning in Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King.” English Studies 4 (1984): 316–26.Google Scholar
“The English in India.” Westminster Review 13 n.s. (Jan. 1858): 180–209.Google Scholar
FussellPaul, Jr. Paul, Jr. “Irony, Freemasonry, and Humane Ethics in Kipling's ‘The Man Who Would Be King.’” ELH 25.3 (1958): 216–33.Google Scholar
Hai, Ambreen. “On Truth and Lie in a Colonial Sense: Kipling's Tales of Tale-telling.” ELH 64.2 (1997): 599–625.Google Scholar
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd. ser., vol. 147 (20 July 1857–28 August 1857): 440–545 [Benjamin Disraeli's speech on the Indian Mutiny].Google Scholar
Harvie, Christopher. “‘The Sons of Martha’: Technology, Transport, and Rudyard Kipling.” Victorian Studies 20.3 (1977): 269–82.Google Scholar
“India as it is – India as it may be.” British Quarterly Review 27 (Jan. 1858): 202–44.Google Scholar
“Indian Mutiny.” Quarterly Review 102 (Oct. 1857): 534–70.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling. Ed. Pinney, Thomas. Vol. 1: 1872–89. London: Macmillan, 1990.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. “The Man Who Would Be King.” The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. Ed. Cornell, Louis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 244–79.Google Scholar
Lane, Christopher. The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Lang, Andrew. Essays in Little. London: Henry, 1891.Google Scholar
Lewis, C. S. “Kipling's World.” Kipling Journal 25.127, 25.128 (1958): 8–16, 7–11.Google Scholar
Majeed, Javed. “Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug: The Anglo-Indian Novel as a Genre in the Making.” Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India. Ed. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. 86–110.Google Scholar
Marx, Edward. “How We Lost Kafiristan.” Representations 67 (Summer 1999): 44–66.Google Scholar
Matin, A. Michael. “‘The Hun is at the Gate!’: Historicizing Kipling's Militaristic Rhetoric, from the Imperial Periphery to the National Center.” Studies in the Novel 31.3 (1999): 317–56.Google Scholar
Meyers, Jeffrey. “The Idea of Moral Authority in The Man Who Would Be King.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 8.4 (1968): 711–23.Google Scholar
Moore-Gilbert, B. J.Kipling and “Orientalism”. London: Croom Helm, 1986.Google Scholar
Moran, Neil K. Kipling and Afghanistan: A Study of the Young Author as Journalist Writing on the Afghan Border Crisis of 1884–1885. Jefferson: McFarland, 2005.Google Scholar
Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.Google Scholar
Page, Norman. A Kipling Companion. London: Macmillan, 1984.Google Scholar
Pionke, Albert D.Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W.Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.Google Scholar
“The Sepoy Rebellion.” London Quarterly Review 9 (Oct. 1857): 208–62.Google Scholar
Shippey, Thomas A. and Short, Michael. “Framing and Distancing in Kipling's ‘The Man Who Would Be King.’” Journal of Narrative Technique 2.2 (1972): 75–87.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Zoreh. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Taylor, Philip Meadows. Confessions of a Thug (1839). Ed. Brantlinger, Patrick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Teltscher, Kate. “‘The Fearful Name of the Black Hole’: Fashioning an Imperial Myth.” Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India. Ed. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. 30–51.Google Scholar
“The Thugs: or, Secret Murderers of India.” Edinburgh Review 64 (Jan. 1837): 357–95.Google Scholar
Tomkins, J. M. S.The Art of Rudyard Kipling. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1959.Google Scholar