Rudyard Kipling: an International Writer
Institute of English Studies, London
October 21-22, 2011
Keynote Speakers: Amit Chaudhuri and Charles Allen
"Left and right of my writing-table were two big globes, on one of which a great airman had once outlined in white paint those air-routes to the East and Australia which were well in use before my death." - Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself
Kipling, hailed as "an interpreter of Empire" (Times, 18 Jan 1936), was regarded as a national institution when he died in 1936, and his funeral in Westminster Abbey was attended by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. His current reputation is many-sided: sometimes condemned as a racist who embodied the imperial mind-set or dismissed as a writer "whom nobody read," he is increasingly both value and criticized for his complex response to the "otherness" and diversity of races and classes in his writing.
This conference, sponsored by the Kipling Society, focuses on the figure of Kipling as an international writer. It seeks not only to re-assess Kipling’s involvement in imperial ideology, but also to examine his interests in wider international affairs and his connections with foreign locations both within and outside the British Empire. The conference thereby aims to re-examine his work and achievement by exploring his diverse roles as an internationalist, and by considering his relevance to our post-modern globalizing world. Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Travels and travel writing
• Anglo-American relationships
• Anglo-Indian journalism
• War journalism and propaganda
• Inter-colonial networks
• Imperialism and cosmopolitanism
• Kipling’s writing on India, and other colonies
• Dislocation and returning: exiles, immigrants, expatriates
• Islam and other world religions
• Jews and anti-Semitism
• Kipling and Freemasonry
• Englishness and place
• The literature of modern technology
• The sea and sailors
• Postcolonial responses to Kipling
• Kipling’s place in modernism and other international literary movements
• Intertextuality and literary traditions
• The literature of "other" places (France, Scandinavia, Japan, etc.)
Send your proposals of 150-300 words for 20-minute papers to J.E.Montefiore@kent.ac.uk by 31 March 2011, entering your email subject as International Kipling 2011.
Conference Organizers: Professor Jan Montefiore and Dr. Kaori Nagai