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"I want to be like you": Riffs on Kipling in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book
- Children's Literature Association Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2011
- pp. 164-189
- 10.1353/chq.2011.0021
- Article
- Additional Information
This article explores the intertextual relationship between Neil Gaiman and Rudyard Kipling. Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008) adapts or "riffs" on Kipling's two Jungle Books (1894-5) complicating Kipling's conventional representations of good and evil, as well as his construction of individual identity. In exchange, Gaiman reads Kipling back to a contemporary audience, resurrecting him from the graveyard of Empire. By transforming Kipling's Victorian jungle into a Victorian graveyard set in the middle of 21st century England, Gaiman re-contextualizes Kipling's value-system, suggesting to contemporary readers how we might now read or re-read Kipling while re-negotiating his imperialist politics.