Rudyard Kipling's Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Series edited by Julian Wolfreys
Drawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century’s literature and culture

Rudyard Kipling's Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces
Lizzy Welby

Reads Kipling’s fiction through the lens of French feminism to reinstate the abjected maternal feminine in his art

This study provides an entirely new reading of Kipling's fiction using the feminist psychoanalytic methodology of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, focusing particularly on ideas of the abjected maternal feminine. It examines Kipling's ambivalent relationship to the India of his childhood and the 'loss' of his mother figures. In doing so, it peels back the layers of masculine bravado that continues to characterize Kipling’s fiction to reveal a valorized ‘feminine’ space. From readings of the 1888 story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' through The Jungle Book and Stalky & Co., Kim, The Day's Work, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, Lizzy Welby demonstrates that Kipling created ways of rediscovering a symbolised feminine landscape as a restorative space, which was part of his 'psychic mapping'.

Key Features:
Demonstrates a steady development through Kipling’s long and extensive writing career

Provides insights into the man and his art as well as providing a new way of reading Kipling

References a considerable range of scholarly and biographical work on Kipling, historical and cultural studies of nineteenth century India

Offers close reading of passages from Kipling’s fiction, showing how a feminised landscape is violated by (masculine) technological developments

Dr Lizzy Welby is a creative and critical writer specialising in the works of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. She has published articles and chapters on Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter. In 2012, she was awarded third place at the Bridport Prize for Short Fiction for her story ‘Jugged Hare’. She lives in London and teaches at the College Francais Bilingue de Londres. In 2014 she won first prize in the Lorian Hemingway short story competition for a story entitled ‘The Breakers’ s’.