Kipling and the critics

Sinopse

It would be difficult to think of another artist, dead thirty years, who continues to be at once so popular and so cordially hated as Rudyard Kipling is today. Indeed, a compiler of literary reputation studies could not choose a more perplexing subject. In the last analysis, it is not upon the adulation of the crowd but rather on the long-term respect of serious readers and responsible critics that literary survival depends. Obviously, an anthology as selective as this one must give an incomplete picture of the history of Kipling studies. Yet if it at least succeeds in being representative of the Kipling criticism that has been produced in English during the last seventy-five years, it may help to explain the ambivalent attitude toward the author and his work which makes it possible for the man to be at once so very popular and so heartily disliked. Kipling criticism comes down to us in three essentially parallel (and too often mutually exclusive) traditions, traditions represented by Buchanan's attack, Besant's defense, and Dobrée's analysis, and it is precisely the exclusiveness of these traditions which makes a consensus on Kipling so difficult to achieve. - Introduction. Essays which depict the fluctuations in Kipling's reputation.