MACMILLAN Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity

Kipling's Imperial Boy opens by examining the significance of boyhood in the evolution of European modernity. Chapter one shows how closely the figure of the adolescent (the 'boy') is associated with questions of imperial expansion and consolidation. The chapters that follow take up Rudyard Kipling's fiction of the imperial boy, emphasizing the imaginative link between adolescence and cultural hybridity and offering detailed readings of The Jungle Book, Stalky & Co ., and Kim. Review 'Don Randall's 'Kipling's Imperial Boy' is an important contribution to Kipling studies and to the area of colonial discourse analysis more generally. Historically sensitive and theoretically aware, it provides a persuasive and original mapping of theories of cultural hybridity onto discourses of adolescence - and vice versa. In a series of close readings of 'The Jungle Books', 'Stalky and Co' and 'Kim', Randall ably demonstrates that Kipling's imperial boys are liminal figures who both subvert and reinforce the borders between cultures and who both counter and confirm the masculinism of colonial epistemology. 'Kipling's Imperial Boy' is further evidence of the continuing recuperation of Kipling as a complex and important artist and thinker.' - Bart Moore Gilbert, University of London '...a very impressive piece of work.' - Laurence Kitzan, Victorian Studies About the Author DON RANDALL is Assistant Professor of English at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He has published several articles in scholarly journals, including Texas Studies in Literature and Language and Novel.