Kim

Rudyard Kipling

May 2011 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Two men - Kim, a boy growing into early manhood, and the lama, an old ascetic priest - are fired by a quest. Kim is white, although born in India. While he wants to play the Great Game of imperialism, he is also spiritually bound to the lama and he tries to reconcile these opposing strands. A celebration of their friendship in an often hostile environment, Kim captures the opulence of India's exotic landscape, overlaid by the uneasy presence of the British Raj.

Contains an introduction by Harish Trivedi placing the novel in its literary and social context. Also includes notes, chronology, further reading, a General Preface by the series editor Jan Montefiore and Edward Said's famous introduction from the previous Penguin Classics edition as an appendix.

About the author

RUDYARD KIPLING was born in Bombay in 1865. In 1882 Kipling started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems - notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) - which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. His most famous works include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902). Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936.

JAN MONTEFIOIRE is Professor of 20th Century English Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996); Arguments of Heart and Mind:Selected Essays 1977-2000 (2002); Feminism and Poetry (3rd edition, 2004); and Rudyard Kipling (2007).

HARISH TRIVEDI is Professor of English, University of Delhi. He is author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993), and has co-edited The Nation across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations (2007) and Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (2000).