Traveller's Tales: Rudyard Kipling's Gothic Short Fiction
- 1 July 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Edinburgh University Press in Gothic Studies
- Vol. 23 (2), 181-200
- https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2021.0093
Abstract
Between 1884 and 1936, Rudyard Kipling wrote over 300 short stories, most of which were first published in colonial and cosmopolitan periodicals before being reissued in short-story collections. This corpus contains a number of critically neglected Gothic stories that fall into four groups: stories that belong to the ghost-story tradition; stories that represent the colonial encounter through gothic tropes of horror and the uncanny but do not necessarily include any supernatural elements; stories that develop an elegiac and elliptical Gothic Modernism; and stories that make use of the First World War and its aftermath as a gothic environment. This essay evaluates Kipling's contribution to the critically neglected genre of the Gothic short story, with a focus on the stories' persistent preoccupation with spatial tropes of travel, disorientation and displacement.Keywords
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