植民地の「現実」を規定する

―ロンドン文壇における一八九〇年前後のキプリング受容―

抄録

　In 1889, at the age of twenty-four, Kipling abandoned his career as an Anglo-Indian journalist and “returned” to London in order to seek his literary fame there. Critics received his earlier works with enthusiasm. This article explores how metropolitan reviews of Kipling, which were instrumental in establishing his popularity, dealt with the issues of cultural distance and difference between “Home” and colonial India.

　Firstly, we examined how Kipling’s texts were contextualised. In the late eighteen-eighties, romance, which was gaining popularity once again at that time, was often criticised as too unrealistic. Responding to such accusations, many defenders of the genre emphasised Kipling’s colonial background, thereby finding “exotic realism” in his texts. He was therefore hailed as a promising writer of “realistic romance.” These evaluations reveal the critics’ desire to imagine the unfamiliar reality of colonial India as Kipling represented it.

　Secondly, the article explores some ideological implications of this desire. Apparently discussing the “realistic” quality of Kipling’s texts, metropolitan reviewers in fact sought to articulate the socio-cultural values that the reality in question was supposed to embody. Partly for this reason, they dismissed as second-rate those texts that were unconsciously regarded as too subversive of imperial premises. In this respect, the critics’ receptions of Kipling reveal an important process by which metropolitan cultural imagination defined the reality of the Empire.