ABSTRACT
While a considerable number of studies on have focussed on so-called boys’ literature, this paper intends to study the works of both Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats to consider how their notions of masculine virility inform their respective choices of genre and of narrative styles. Kipling, though supposedly a largely self-appointed spokesperson of the Raj, was still able to condone it, and Yeats, one of Empire’s less unfortunate victims, was still imperial in his stylistics, mannerisms, and ambitions. Hence, the fact that Kipling and Yeats were on different sides of the British Empire’s fault-lines will also be taken into consideration by this paper as it ruminates on the kind of men their writing addressed, and the kind of interventions which they sought to make in the empire through these men. The kind of men who would lead and defend the empire as well as those who would strike at it seem to be constituted similarly, and in undertaking this critical survey across the spectrum of Kipling’s and Yeats’s writing I hope to be able to link them both to a shared dialogue of masculinity and imperialism.
