SOURCE: Randall, Don. “Post-Mutiny Allegories of Empire in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41, no. 1 (spring 1998): 97-120.

In the following essay, Randall underscores how British imperial history, particularly the history of mutinies, informs Kipling's short fiction.

In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 Patrick Brantlinger highlights the special status of the Indian Mutiny in the British empire's cultural legacy. Briefly documenting post-Mutiny literary production, he observes, “at least fifty [Mutiny novels] were written before 1900, and at least thirty more before World War II. There was also a deluge of eyewitness accounts, journal articles, histories, poems and plays dealing with the 1857-58 rebellion.” Brantlinger concurs with Hilda Gregg, who first affirmed, in 1897, the Mutiny's unparalleled capacity to capture and command the British imperial imagination. He also remarks that Gregg, more impressed with the quantity than the quality of Mutiny fictions, regretted that Rudyard...