Book description
Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also
his greatest long work. Two men - Kim, a boy growing into early
manhood, and the lama, an old ascetic priest - are fired by a quest.
Kim is white, although born in India. While he wants to play the Great
Game of imperialism, he is also spiritually bound to the lama and he
tries to reconcile these opposing strands. A celebration of their
friendship in an often hostile environment, Kim captures the
opulence of India's exotic landscape, overlaid by the uneasy presence
of the British Raj.
Contains an introduction by Harish Trivedi placing the novel in its
literary and social context. Also includes notes, chronology, further
reading, a General Preface by the series editor Jan Montefiore and
Edward Said's famous introduction from the previous Penguin Classics
edition as an appendix.
RUDYARD KIPLING was born in Bombay in 1865. In 1882 Kipling
started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body
of work, stories, sketches and poems - notably Plain Tales from the
Hills (1888) - which made him an instant literary celebrity when
he returned to England in 1889. His most famous works include The
Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories
(1902). Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and
other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded
the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936.
JAN MONTEFIOIRE is Professor of 20th Century English Literature at
the University of Kent. She is the author of Men and Women Writers
of the 1930s (1996); Arguments of Heart and Mind:Selected
Essays 1977-2000 (2002); Feminism and Poetry (3rd
edition, 2004); and Rudyard Kipling (2007).
HARISH TRIVEDI is Professor of English, University of Delhi. He is
author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India
(1993), and has co-edited The Nation across the World: Postcolonial
Literary Representations (2007) and Literature and Nation:
Britain and India 1800-1990 (2000).
