Kipling’s Art of Fiction, 1884–1901 by David Sergeant, and: Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 by Bradley Deane, and: Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes by Neil Hultgren (review)

Each of the three books under consideration in this review takes up a well-worn topic concerning literature and the British Empire between 1857 and the start of World War I. Taken together, they add to conversations about authorship, form, and masculinity in the literature of the later nineteenth century. Variably and variously, they return to old problems and ask new questions. As a whole they signal that, while some old paradigms may be hard to escape, scholars still have new connections to offer. Ultimately, they suggest the enduring relevance of nineteenth-century literary studies, as they remind us of the persistence of Victorian forms of writing in contemporary understandings of war.

In Kipling’s Art of Fiction, 1884–1901, David Sergeant makes a valiant attempt to rescue the works of Rudyard Kipling from just about every past examination which sees his artistry as compromised by his imperialist ideology. It is impossible today to condemn Kipling as “the voice of the hooligan,” as did Robert Buchanan in The Contemporary Review, and yet that was one of his voices (The Contemporary Review, vol. 76 [1899], 774–89). Sergeant distinguishes between two kinds of Kipling stories: those that are “coercive” or “authoritarian” versus those that are “more aesthetically sophisticated” and elude “definitive interpretation in a way that can be troubling to the right-wing ideology” (4). Kim (1901), for example, is much too complex to be read as a straightforward endorsement of imperial rule, but neither is it a critique of that rule. With its direct call on the United States to colonize the Philippines, however, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) is little more than imperialist propaganda. Sergeant’s distinction between “coercive” and “sophisticated” stories, however, is similar to those in many earlier commentaries on Kipling. His readings of individual stories are often perceptive, but his rescue attempt does not seem much better than earlier ones. Kipling, of course, was one of many Anglo-Indian writers. Sergeant could have asked if the novels and stories by Flora Annie Steel, for example, exhibit the same authoritarian versus aesthetic split that he finds in Kipling. Is such an ideological formation evident in other ways in Anglo-Indian culture around 1900?

Sergeant’s project might have benefited from more contextualization, but he seems to believe that would detract from aesthetic appreciation. However, it is largely through contextualization that Bradley Deane, pursuing another well-worn topic in Victorian literary studies, manages to provide numerous fresh insights in Masculinity and the New Imperialism. Deane’s first chapter, for example, starts by focusing on Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din” (1892) (“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”). Deane proceeds to recount the heroic action of Richard Gush, a Quaker immigrant to the Eastern Cape Colony in southern Africa. Gush “rode out unarmed to confront the three hundred Xhosa men who had just attacked the town [of Salem] and made off with its cattle.” Gush told the Xhosas that the English settlers had “done them no harm, and … were … their spiritual benefactors,” who were “‘pray[ing] for you that you may become better men’” (19). Gush apparently shamed the Xhosas into returning the cattle. Deane draws as well on writings by Captain Frederick Marryat, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Stuart Mill, and Samuel Smiles to illustrate the spiritual concept of becoming “better men.”

Deane’s second chapter examines the many complexities for masculinity in so...