ABSTRACT
The outcome of a reichbildungsroman is the creation of an adult who, having "gone native" as a child because of abuses he witnessed by the empire, is able to mature and become a better ruler of his adoptive land. In the Mowgli stories in The Jungle Book and in Kim, the British Empire recognizes the protagonists' superior brand of cosmopolitanism and recruits them to work for its improvement. Reeve's steampunk novel Larklight is a twenty-first-century reichbildungsroman that follows Kipling's character development in The Jungle Books and Kim, but complicates it by intensifying the critique against the Empire through addressing problems of race and gender. Looking at theories of cosmopolitanism, Kim is revealed to be a true Stoic Cosmopolitan. Some of the most celebrated novels of the late Victorian period, including works by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, and R. L. Stevenson, all feature the Empire prominently in the background of their protagonists' lives.
