The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling [VINTAGE 2002] [FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Gilmour, David

Editore: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2002

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Fine unread condition golden brown boards, brown cloth spine and gold spine lettering contained in a near fine condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by David Gilmour; List of Illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; Notes; Bibliography and Index. Illustrated with a section of black-and-white photographic plates and preliminary page maps. A 1/2 inch repaired closed tear at upper right rear jacket edge. "Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a unique figure in the literary life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a great writer who was at the same time a great icon of the British Empire. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and added more phrases to the language than any man since Shakespeare, yet he was also an apologist for imperial government and policies, a man who incarnated an era that was beginning to fade even as he celebrated it. David Gilmour's superbly nuanced biography of Kipling is the first to show the depth and complexity of Kipling's writing and world - from the earliest publications of his youth (his first stories about Anglo-Indian life launched him into celebrity when he was only twenty-four), through his many novels, stories, and poems composed in the triumphant years of Queen Victoria's reign, and then to his astonishing output before and after World War I and during the 1930s, when he lived to see the rise of Hitler threaten England's very existence. Gilmour's detailed, wide-ranging narrative suggests the many reasons why this child of the era of imperial self-confidence, this laureate of the Empire at its apogee, saw early on that the Empire's demise was imminent. The long trajectory of Kipling's life matched the trajectory of the British Empire from its zenith to its final decades - his great poem "Recessional" celebrated Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, while his last poems warned of the dangers of Nazism - and he himself was transformed from the apostle of success to the prophet of national decline. Throughout, as Gilmour's subtle narrative makes clear, Kipling's brilliantly entertaining, profoundly humane works of art deeply influenced the way his readers saw both themselves and the British Empire. Based on years of extensive research in Britain and in hitherto underexplored archives in the United States, The Long Recessional is a fascinating study of a man who embodied the many paradoxes and difficulties of his age. Gilmour's remarkable accomplishment honors the many ways that Kipling's enduring but mysterious art challenged his own generation - and ours." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.

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• Titolo: The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling [VINTAGE 2002] [FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]
• Editore: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• Lingua: Inglese
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Disegnatore: Lai, Chin-Yee (jacket design); Evans, Mary (jacket photograph); Leggat, Moira (author photograph)
• Edizione: 1st Edition
• Stampa: 1st Printing
• Condizione: Fine
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: Near Fine