ABSTRACT
This book bridges the distance, creative and critical, between Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats, two of the greatest authors of the Anglophone world. For long read and taught as disparate members of distinctly different canons, Kipling and Yeats can now be seen as connected in a complex contemporaneity which not only shaped their personalities and attitudes in similar moulds but also lent hues of mutuality to their substantial corpus. A century and a half after their birth, seeing them linked by more than just this banal coincidence affords scholars of literature, empire, and gender key insights into the aesthetics and appeal of some of the most powerful and enduring pieces of art in the English language. To facilitate and encourage conjoined readings of Kipling and Yeats, we have structured this volume into four thematic sections premised on distinct yet overlapping aspects of the authors’ literary lives and careers. Not all essays consider Kipling and Yeats together, but by clustering those with shared motifs we hope the reader will be able to move seamlessly from one argument to the other without losing sight of the propositions which cogently bind them to each other.
