On The Cultural Connotations Of Kipling's The Jungle Books

In 1907, the Swedish Academy, in consideration of "the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration", awarded Rudyard Kipling the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling became the first English writer so honoured. Because of his unique life experiences, the strong intention to be didactic and close relation to colonialism, he became one of the most controversial writers in English literature.The Jungle Books which consist of many stories about animals, showing a full scale of his ideas and subject matter of his writing are widespread and influential. They attract the children as well as adult readers and literary critics, for they are filled with not only great originality and interest but abounded insights of the life and the world.With the background of his personal experience and the British Empire then, the thesis aims at digging out its deeper cultural connotations. The protagonist, wolf child Mogli hovered between the wolf and human society. The emotional conflict and the crisis of identity recognition is the real reflection of Kipling himself. He is a stranger as well as a marginal man. Living in the marginal area or at the crossing of two or more social groups, he and Mogli are alike. This living background and identity establishment figures out the subject matter of his works. That is the ideal, personal and literator's colonialism which is characterized by a new form of colonists and the involving of ecological ideas. In Kipling's mind, this new type of colonists is the ideal administrator of the colonial world, who shares the same characteristic of marginal man as he and Mogli. While the Law of the Jungle connoted with ecological ideas is his ideal solution to all the social problems.