Kipling and Yeats at 150: Retrospectives/Perspectives

This book evaluates the parallels, divergences, and convergences in the literary legacies of Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats. Coming 150 years after their birth, the volume sheds light on the conversational undercurrents that pull together the often diametrically polar worldviews of these two seminal figures of the English literary canon. Contextualizing their texts to the larger milieu that Kipling and Yeats lived in and contributed to, the book investigates a range of aesthetic and perceptual similarities – from cultures of violence to notions of masculinity, from creative debts to Shakespeare to responses to British imperialism and industrial modernity – to establish the perceptible consonance of their works. Kipling and Yeats are known to have never corresponded, but the chapters collected here show evidence of the influence that their acute awareness of each other’s work and thought may have had.

Offering fresh perspectives which make Kipling’s and Yeats’s diverse texts, contexts, and legacies contemporarily relevant, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, critical theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Promodini Varma is Director (Admissions & Evaluations) at South Asian University, New Delhi, India. She was Principal at Bharati College, University of Delhi, until May 2015 and was part of the Department of English since the college’s inception. She has edited six textbooks for undergraduate students at the University of Delhi as well as translated some of Samuel Beckett’s plays into Hindi. Her research interests include South Asian literature, modern drama, and English Language Teaching.

Anubhav Pradhan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India, and works on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India. Simultaneously, he is also engaged in questions of affect, heritage, land, and identity with close reference to Delhi. He has served Primus Books as its Senior Marketing Editor and Bharati College, University of Delhi, as an Assistant Professor.