This book explores the tension between the conservatism and the imaginative process across the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s fiction. It shows how Kipling the conservative thinker explores problematic aspects of Empire and the English class-system, both because it is unavoidable and because his art requires it. This tension is evident in the Indian and ‘Imperial’ Kipling and in his later ‘English’ stories. Situating Kipling’s fiction within changing social and political contexts, Mark Paffard shows the anxieties Kipling as a conservative responds to in the early Indian stories to be very different from those caused by the economic and technological upheaval of the ‘Belle Epoque’, and those arising from the First World War. Paffard reveals how Kipling’s development as a writer is shaped by his need to respond differently to a changing world: imperialist ideology and conservatism dictate the stories that he sets out to write, and his imagination and sympathy shape the stories that are finally written.

Some of the most compelling and enduring creative work of the late Victorian and Edwardian Era came from committed imperialists and conservatives. Their continuing popularity owes a great deal to the way their guiding ideas resonated with modernism in the arts and psychology. The analogy they perceived between the imperial business of subjugating savage subjects and the civilised ego's struggle to subdue the unruly savage within generated some of their best artistic endeavours. In a series of thematically linked chapters Imperium of the soul explores the work of writers Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard and John Buchan along with the composer Edward Elgar and the architect Herbert Baker. It culminates with an analysis of their mutual infatuation with T. E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - who represented all their dreams for the future British Empire but whose ultimate paralysis of creative imagination exposed the fatal flaw in their psycho-political project. This transdisciplinary study will interest not only scholars of imperialism and the history of ideas but general readers fascinated by bygone ideas of exotic adventure and colonial rule.

Brings together, for the first time, Kipling's uncollected short stories, many unknown in the West, and some previously unpublished.

"These 29 essays on fantasy, skepticism, writing, and related topics--spanning nearly two decades--are filled with the insightful observations of a literary master. Schweitzer is one of the best critics in the field."--John Gregory Betancourt. (Criticism)

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

H.G. Wells was described by one of his European critics as a 'seismograph of his age'. He is one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction, and as a novelist, essayist, educationalist and political propagandist his influence has been felt in every European country. This collection of essays by scholarly experts shows the varied and dramatic nature of Wells's reception, including translations, critical appraisals, novels and films on Wellsian themes, and responses to his own well-publicized visits to Russia and elsewhere. The authors chart the intense ideological debate that his writings occasioned, particularly in the inter-war years, and the censorship of his books in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain. This book offers pioneering insights into Wells's contribution to 20th century European literature and to modern political ideas, including the idea of European union. Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe Review

Essays on the use, and misuse, of the Middle Ages for political aims.

Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. This new selection brings together the best of his short writings, following the development of his work over fifty years. They take us from the harsh, cruel, vividly realized world of the 'Indian' stories that made his name, through the experimental modernism of his middle period to the highly-wrought subtleties of his later pieces. Including the tale of insanity and empire, 'The Man Who Would Be King', the high-spirited 'The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat', the fable of childhood cruelty and revenge 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep', the menacing psychological study 'Mary Postgate' and the ambiguous portrayal of grief and mourning in 'The Gardener', here are stories of criminals, ghosts, femmes fatales, madness and murder.

This book explores the tension between the conservatism and the imaginative process across the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s fiction. It shows how Kipling the conservative thinker explores problematic aspects of Empire and the English class-system, both because it is unavoidable and because his art requires it. This tension is evident in the Indian and ‘Imperial’ Kipling and in his later ‘English’ stories. Situating Kipling’s fiction within changing social and political contexts, Mark Paffard shows the anxieties Kipling as a conservative responds to in the early Indian stories to be very different from those caused by the economic and technological upheaval of the ‘Belle Epoque’, and those arising from the First World War. Paffard reveals how Kipling’s development as a writer is shaped by his need to respond differently to a changing world: imperialist ideology and conservatism dictate the stories that he sets out to write, and his imagination and sympathy shape the stories that are finally written.

This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people’s growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home and were shared by many consumers. Roger Hansford explores relationships between music produced in the early 1800s for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance, offering a new view of romanticism in British print culture. He surveys romance novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Edward Bulwer and Charles Kingsley in the period 1790–1850, interrogating the ways that music served to create mood and atmosphere, enlivened social scenes and contributed to plot developments. He explores the connections between musical scenes in romance fiction and the domestic song literature, treating both types of source and their intersection as examples of material culture. Hansford’s intersectional reading revolves around a series of imaginative figures – including the minstrel, fairies, mermaids, ghosts, and witches, and Christians engaged both in virtue and vice – the identities of which remained consistent as influence passed between the art forms. While romance authors quoted song lyrics and included musical descriptions and characters, their novels recorded and modelled the performance of songs by the middle and upper classes, influencing the work of composers and the actions of performers who read romance fiction.