Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
- Messages
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I'm tempted to nominate Kipling (1865-1936) as the great neglected British author of the late Victorian era and early 20th century, as (it seems to me) Sir Walter Scott may be the neglected master of the early 19th century. These authors once were enormously popular (and Kipling was the first English author to cop the Nobel Prize in literature), but some of their opinions are unfashionable today (and misremembered by people who dismiss them), and both have a sense of history that is rarely possessed by readers and English department faculty. Many of their stories also use dialect; it is curious that, in our time when so many plume themselves on their adherence to "multiculturalism," the attempt to suggest the voice of people not speaking standard English stops readers dead.
Kipling seems to me a genuine master of the weird tale, whether in his early Indian stories or later story collections. He can be gruesome ("The Mark of the Beast," for example) and poignant ("The Wish-House").
Here's a handful of Kipling stories worth looking up:
A Bank Fraud
In Flood Time
On Greenhow Hill
At the Pit’s Mouth
Baa Baa Black Sheep
Without Benefit of Clergy
The Man Who Would Be King
Wee Willie Winkie
Courting of Dinah Shadd
The Mark of the Beast
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Phantom ’Rickshaw
At the End of the Passage
“Wireless” (but read Keats’s poem “The Eve of St. Agnes” first)
“They”
The House Surgeon
Mary Postgate
Mrs. Bathurst
The Wish House
My Son’s Wife
Dayspring Mishandled
Not all of these are weird tales, but then I'm not trying to "sell" Kipling simply as an author of such.
Excellent notes on Kipling's stories are available. Just click on the story title.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/bookmart_fra.htm
You can use Project Gutenberg to track down his stories online, and used copies of Kipling books should be easily come by.
Kipling seems to me a genuine master of the weird tale, whether in his early Indian stories or later story collections. He can be gruesome ("The Mark of the Beast," for example) and poignant ("The Wish-House").
Here's a handful of Kipling stories worth looking up:
A Bank Fraud
In Flood Time
On Greenhow Hill
At the Pit’s Mouth
Baa Baa Black Sheep
Without Benefit of Clergy
The Man Who Would Be King
Wee Willie Winkie
Courting of Dinah Shadd
The Mark of the Beast
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Phantom ’Rickshaw
At the End of the Passage
“Wireless” (but read Keats’s poem “The Eve of St. Agnes” first)
“They”
The House Surgeon
Mary Postgate
Mrs. Bathurst
The Wish House
My Son’s Wife
Dayspring Mishandled
Not all of these are weird tales, but then I'm not trying to "sell" Kipling simply as an author of such.
Excellent notes on Kipling's stories are available. Just click on the story title.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/bookmart_fra.htm
You can use Project Gutenberg to track down his stories online, and used copies of Kipling books should be easily come by.
