Empire Consciousness And Kipling's Literary Writing

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a unique figure in British literary history. Being the first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in Britain, his poetry was very popular as well as his stories like the Jungle Books and Kim. He was an important colonial writer for his writings of British colony—Indian life and surroundings. His obsession with the Empire earned him the title "Imperialist Drummer ". Since the very beginning, his works elicited two totally contrasting responses: one positive, the other negative. This situation is well carried into the present 21^st century. Examples of orientalism and other topics closely related with postcolonial writing and theory are discovered to be a significant part of his writing, which makes him a new and hot research object in the tide of postcolonial theory. But the study of Kiping in China just takes its first step for various reasons, which contrasts sharply with that in the west. This paper tries to investigate the relationship between Kipling's empire consciousness and his literary writing by way of close reading under the guidance of postcolonial theory, which can further help us to understand the complex relation between ideology and literature of a specific historical moment. It consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 centers on the women in Kipling's works and their relationship with the empire. The author's attitude toward the white female in the colony is contradictory: they are great and devoted sometimes, but they are hindrance of men—empire builders. To the hard work of empire building, they can only participate in the role of traditional wife and mother, which is secondary and auxiliary. The colonized women undergo manifold hardships and pressures. In the encounter with the white men, they were either the angel or the evil witch. No matter in which image, they could not expect to fare well in the encounter. Early death, abandonment, or punishment is their fate in Kipling's writing, which shows the colonizer's mind and the relationship between two races.In the second chapter, the special group located in the frontier of the empire—common soldiers become the focus of the dissertation. Common soldiers are insignificant in the high classic literature. But Kipling's soldiers with their unique characteristics cry for understanding and respect, for it is they that protect people's purse and safety, which motivates the author's attention to them.The third chapter is about the imperial administrators in the empire. They are described as the holders of great burden in the colony. They benefit the land with their advanced technology and democracy, but at the same time feel dwarfed and pressed by India's old tradition and its vastness. The colonizer mimic man and the colonized mimic man are in great contrast in Kipling's writing, which reflects the author's attitude toward them and predicates some of the important issues in postcolonial theory. In the fourth chapter, Kipling's educational ideas and cultural identity are investigated through his Stalky stories, Kim and Mowgli. His consideration of these issues is helpful to understand both the situation in the colonial period and their complex connotation in the present age.The fifth chapter discusses the representation of Kipling's empire consciousness in his Puck stories. The empire runs through his whole writing career, including his later stories which are usually regarded as having divorced from his obsession with empire. This shows the important position empire occupies in his literary writing and in that age.