ABSTRACT
In the two preceding chapters, I have been concerned with a dialogic reading of the impact of colonialism on the culture and literature of Empire that is able to register the ambivalences of Kipling’s gothic and urban texts. Kipling has a certain affinity for the gothic form because it allows him to address powerful feelings of fear and loathing. Gothic narratives cultivate uncertainty and offer a ‘double-take’ on a realist and mimetic enumeration of names and things. These stories generate a dream-like atmosphere of terror and paranoia through their presentation of a self that is possessed of an Other, or a self that is divested of its own house. In a similar manner, Kipling’s colonial city can be approached as a place of uneven structural and narrative ambivalence. Calcutta is a historical and geographical location that is inscribed by the politics of segregation. But Kipling’s city is more than this, it is also a hybrid discursive space produced through the rhetoric of contagion and the ironic re-staging of Calcutta within the language and literature of nineteenth-century London.
