This book explores the tension between the conservatism and the imaginative process across the entirety of Rudyard Kipling s fiction. It shows how Kipling the conservative thinker explores problematic aspects of Empire and the English class-system, both because it is unavoidable and because his art requires it. This tension is evident in the Indian and Imperial Kipling and in his later English stories. Situating Kipling s fiction within changing social and political contexts, Mark Paffard shows the anxieties Kipling as a conservative responds to in the early Indian stories to be very different from those caused by the economic and technological upheaval of the Belle Epoque , and those arising from the First World War. Paffard reveals how Kipling s development as a writer is shaped by his need to respond differently to a changing world: imperialist ideology and conservatism dictate the stories that he sets out to write, and his imagination and sympathy shape the stories that are finally written.
