THE STORIES
These are some of the short stories that focus on or have been influenced by aspects of the Great War.
A Diversity of Creatures 1917
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Debits and Credits 1926
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Sea Constables, a Tale of ‘15
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Limits and Renewals 1932
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The Kipling Society website has links to these stories, with very useful commentary and notes about the text.
THE MODERN SHORT STORY
Another dilemma for literary historians is which literary-historical period should claim Kipling: the Victorians or the modernists. Those who consider Kipling a modern poet and novelist think less of his imperialism than those who place him with the Victorians. Yet Kipling is both Victorian and modern.
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Kipling may be unfashionable. He is certainly at times objectionable. But at his best he is also indelible, and a much more exciting, original writer than his reputation allows.
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Kipling was perhaps the first English writer to embrace the characteristics of the short story form whole-heartedly, and that thus his stories are perfect representations of the transition point between the old-fashioned tale of the nineteenth century and the modern twentieth-century short story.
'Culverts across a deep ditch served for entrances through the unfinished boundary wall. She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.'
The effect, emerging from such nondescript passages, is pointedly dizzying. Kipling may be unfashionable. He is certainly at times objectionable. But at his best he is also indelible, and a much more exciting, original writer than his reputation allows.
A brief survey of the short story:Rudyard Kipling
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/21/short-story-rudyard-kipling
When Rudyard Kipling died in January 1936, the resulting national and international mourning indicated the popularity and enormous influence of his life and work. It demonstrated the esteem in which he was still held and the consequent longevity of his literary success. This thesis examines how Kipling established, maintained and protected his reputation, his purpose in doing so and considers if concern about his own ethnic purity was a central motivation for him in this regard.
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