ABSTRACT
This book evaluates the parallels, divergences, and convergences in the literary legacies of Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats. Coming 150 years after their birth, the volume sheds light on the conversational undercurrents that pull together the often diametrically polar worldviews of these two seminal figures of the English literary canon. Contextualizing their texts to the larger milieu that Kipling and Yeats lived in and contributed to, the book investigates a range of aesthetic and perceptual similarities – from cultures of violence to notions of masculinity, from creative debts to Shakespeare to responses to British imperialism and industrial modernity – to establish the perceptible consonance of their works. Kipling and Yeats are known to have never corresponded, but the chapters collected here show evidence of the influence that their acute awareness of each other’s work and thought may have had.
Offering fresh perspectives which make Kipling’s and Yeats’s diverse texts, contexts, and legacies contemporarily relevant, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, critical theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|56 pages
Influences and legacies
chapter 3|16 pages
The ungendered self
chapter 4|12 pages
Songs of the Wandering Aengus
part II|61 pages
Self and society
chapter 7|15 pages
‘Turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask’
part III|76 pages
Craft, Medium, Politics
chapter 9|15 pages
The chameleon and the peacock
chapter 10|12 pages
‘The writer is indebted to the Pioneer and Civil and Military Gazette’
chapter 11|15 pages
Politics, drama, and poetry
chapter 12|13 pages
Redefining the body of censorship
chapter 13|19 pages
Rudyard Kipling and the networks of empire
part IV|59 pages
Masculinity and/as Empire