Rudyard Kipling: Life, Love, and Art

WILLIAM B. DILLINGHAM

     Outstanding Academic Title 2013

      —Choice's Mark Cummings, Editor & Publisher  Letter to ELT Press       

This is a "beautifully written third book on Rudyard Kipling to serve as a companion volume,"
adding to Dillingham's "acclaimed" Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism. Here he "contributes to a new debate
about the worth and meaning of the imperial writer's short stories, poems, and collections."

"Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty, and general readers."
—Kate Lynass, University of North Texas, Choice, 2013

THIS IS William Dillingham’s third book studying the relationship between Rudyard Kipling’s inner life and his writings, winner of one of Choice magazine's elite Outstanding Academic Title 2013 awards.

The focus is on major short stories, mainly from Kipling’s later period, beginning with an earlier work, “‘The Finest Story in the World,’” and concluding with the last story he wrote, “‘Teem’—a Treasure Hunter.” Rudyard Kipling: Life, Love, and Art analyzes stories that are not only among Kipling’s most accomplished but also demonstrably in need of a fresh, thorough reassessment, furnishing insights into how such intricately complex works as “‘Wireless,’” “Mrs. Bathurst,” “The Bull That Thought,” and “The Wish House” were conceived and how they reflect Kipling’s most cherished beliefs, including his commitments and his fears. As Professor Dillingham says, “we find that frequently at their core are matters that deal with the heart of his craft and subjects that pervade his writings: life, how it should and should not be lived; love, what is healthy about it and what is perilous; and Art, what it is in broad terms ‘proper work’ and how crucially important it is to one’s sense of identity.”

William B. Dillingham (Charles Howard Candler Professor, Emeritus, Emory University) taught at Emory University for forty years and served as chair of the Department of English on three occasions. Among his numerous awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow (Norway). While he has written books and articles on nineteenth-century American literature, in recent years he has become one of the most well-respected scholars in contemporary Kipling studies. His Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Being Kipling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) were designated Outstanding Titles of the year by the influential Choice magazine. Rudyard Kipling: Life, Love, and Art serves as a companion volume to Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism and will be of keen interest to readers of Kipling in the United States and abroad.