Meeting Without Knowing It

Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle

Alexander Bubb

Oxford English Monographs

Compares for the first time the lives of Kipling and Yeats
A biogrpahical structure rovides an appealing narrative that links together a variety of close readings and thematic investigations
Provides a portrait of London literary circles in the 1890s
Suggests a new pathway for life-writing, examining the lives of two writers who never meet or correspond but who obliquely influence one another

Meeting Without Knowing It

Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle

Alexander Bubb

Description

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, with heroism, with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the "mythopoeic" impulse in fin de siecle culture. Meeting Without Knowing It dentifies these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, before charting them against intersections in their lives.

Kipling and Yeats were, for much of their careers, irreconcilable political enemies. However, a cross-reading of the two poets' bardic ambitions, heroic tropes, and interpretations of history reveals that, to achieve their opposed political ends, they frequently partook of a common discourse. Supplementing this analysis with biographical context, we can trace these shared concerns to their late nineteenth century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles that they inhabited in fin de siecle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancor to their ideological division after the Boer War. In turn, acrimony and denunciation only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.

Meeting Without Knowing It

Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle

Alexander Bubb

Oxford English Monographs

Introduction
1. 'We Shall Go Back' Childhoods Lived and Relived
2. Returns, 1881-1886
3. Threshold Figures, 1887-1890
4. Arrival: Negotiating the Literary World of Fin de Siecle London
5. Plotting and Scheming: Experiments Toward a Modern Mythology
6. Authority, 1896-1906
Coda
Appendix: Parallel Chronology
Bibliography

Meeting Without Knowing It

Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle

Alexander Bubb

Oxford English Monographs

Author Information

Alexander Bubb is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University in London. His principal interests lie in Victorian literature and art, as shaped by the European encounter with Asia. Besides fin-de-siècle poetry, he has written on the circulation of books in the British Empire, and technological obsolescence in colonial fiction. He has also published on aspects of modern Indian history - including the business practices of early railway contractors, Irishmen in the colonial military, migrant Indian intellectuals in 1890s London, and the origins of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (which prohibits sex between men). In 2017-18 he was a Marie Curie visiting fellow at Trinity College Dublin, where he began writing his second book on popular translations, made for the Victorian general reader, of classic literature from five Asian languages.

Meeting Without Knowing It

Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle

Alexander Bubb

Oxford English Monographs

Reviews and Awards

University English Book Prize for a first book by a UK early-career researcher

"a fascinating analysis of literary interaction that firmly situates its subjects in their British, Irish, and Indian contexts. By looking at the underlying connections between Kipling and Yeats, Bubb provides an original and engaging reading of fin-de-siècle interaction." -- Joseph Thorne, Liverpool John Moores University, British Association of Victorian Studies newsletter

"Meeting Without Knowing It is a meticulously phrased and engaging study of Kipling's and Yeats's transitional narratives, which raises questions not only about their reception histories, canonical divisions and patterns of mutual exchange, but also about generic strategies of confronting the fragmentation of metropolitan living with the imagined unity of peripheral homes lost and remembered." --Forum for Modern Language Studies

"It is easy to recommend this painstaking analysis and detailed use of sources in pursuing the 'submerged relationship'." -- Jad Adams, Yeats Annual

"Alexander Bubb's innovative handling of the lives and work of Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats looks set to blaze a trail in literary biography." -- Kathy Rees, Notes and Queries

"Highlighting the underacknowledged yet evidently important dynamic between Yeats and Kipling in their capacities as authors and public figures, this monograph is rich in content and expression, and is a welcome addition to the study of Yeats and Kipling as part of the intricate fabric of fin de siecle cultural production." --Ragini Mohite, International Yeats Studies

"Meeting Without Knowing It is a rich and original study of the "cultural nexus" (243) that was the fin de siècle. It takes the provocative but productive step of proceeding through an extended comparison of the lives and careers of Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats, from 1865 to 1906." --David Sergeant, Journal of Postcolonial Writing

"...a concise, ingenious, scholarly, dense, and illuminating double biographical study." --John Batchelor, The Modern Language Review

"a rich and rewarding study of both writers, which succeeds in showing how their affiliations, writings and beliefs reflected and refracted one another." --Jan Montefiore, Times Literary Supplement

Meeting Without Knowing It

Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle

Alexander Bubb

Oxford English Monographs

From Our Blog

Yeats, Kipling, and 'fin-de-si¨cle malaise'

'I don't like disparagement of the Nineties,' W.B. Yeats told the Oxford classicist Maurice Bowra towards the end of his life. 'People have built up an impression of a decadent period by remembering only, when they speak of the Nineties, a few writers who had tragic careers. They do this because those writers were confined within the period'. But, as Yeats explained, those who survived the decade and 'lived to maturity' were the principal authors today. 'The Nineties was in reality a period of very great vigour,' he concluded, 'thought and passion were breaking free from tradition.'

Posted on May 5, 2016

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